


Say A Prayer That I'll Make It To The Other Side

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, Past Ruby/Sam Winchester, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28371276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: The road to Heaven is a narrow one for a former demon
Relationships: Castiel/Meg Masters, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester & Meg Masters
Comments: 14
Kudos: 25
Collections: Megstiel Family Holiday Gift Exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diablo77](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diablo77/gifts).



Eileen knocked on the door of his office.

“I’m off.”

Sam set down the papers he had been grading and stood up to walk her to the garage.

“Be careful,” he recommended, as he signed “ _I love you”_ with his hands.

“Always am,” she replied, with a smile.

He gave her a kiss and saw her off. It had been years and she always came back. And it was true, she _was_ always careful. She knew there was too much on the line for her to not be careful, but even so, the job was dangerous and it took seconds. One slip, one mistake, and he could lose her forever again.

That was why he had been so opposed to it when Eileen told him she wanted to start hunting again. It had been their first and, so far, only big fight. Her reasoning was sound: their son was four, Sam had a stable job, he still had all of his old contacts. Eileen could help. She wouldn’t be scanning the news or the Internet, whiffing for something strange or weird, but if someone called him and needed back up, Eileen could do that.

“No, no.” Sam had shaken his head. “No, I can’t…”

“Sam.” Eileen knelt in front of his armchair and put a hand on his knee. “I know you don’t want to go back and that’s fine. But I have to do this.”

She was like his brother, in that sense. She would keep hunting until she was literally too old to do it. Or until she was dead. Sam dreaded the thought, but there was nothing he could do. He had chosen to marry another hunter and he had to live with it.

That didn’t mean he could avoid the twinge of apprehension in his stomach every time he saw her drive away.

Dean stopped what he was doing on the yard to wave at his mom’s car. Sam smiled to himself and was about to go back inside when he noticed that his son turned around and kept speaking to someone near the gate.

His heart immediately jumped to his throat.

It was a woman, short, with dark blonde hair cascading down her shoulders. She donned a purple leather jacket and jeans and at first sight, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. But Sam knew better than to let appearances fool him.

“Dean!” he called out, as he strode towards the yard.

Dean turned towards him and gave him a grin with a missing tooth.

“Daddy! Meg says she’s a friend of yours!”

Sam scooped his son up in his arms and hoped that he wouldn’t notice the way his heart had jumped to his throat.

“Yes, besties,” the demon said, with a sarcastic smirk. “From way back in the day. We were so close you could say we were the same person at one point.”

Sam forced himself to breathe calmly. She hadn’t changed, of course. She’d somehow managed to find her old meatsuit, even though it had been… what, fifteen, sixteen years at that point? It didn’t seem possible, but then again, Sam had stopped questioning what was possible and what wasn’t a long time ago.

“Yes. Old friends,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Dean, why don’t you go inside and play with your toys?”

“But… I like Meg. She said she would tell me stories about you,” Dean protested.

“Do what your daddy says, kid,” Meg added. “There’ll be time for stories later.”

Dean pouted, but he mumbled “okay”, and ran inside the house when Sam put him down again. He had no illusions that Dean would actually go upstairs. He would probably stand on the couch and peer out to watch Sam speak with Meg.

He still waited until Dean was reasonably out of earshot to ask:

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing, I just said I knew you and he figured out the rest,” Meg assured him, still grinning. “He seems smarter than Original Flavor Dean, that’s for sure.”

Sam clenched his jaw and Meg raised her hands.

“Right. Sore spot. Sorry,” she mumbled. “And, uh… condolences or whatever.”

Sam kept staring daggers into her, but the demon didn’t lose her smile.

“Why are you here?” Sam asked when it became obvious she wasn’t going to speak first. “ _How_ are you here? I thought you were in the Empty.”

“I was. It’s a long story. Can I come in or do you want to do this here where all your neighbors can see us and tell that little wife of yours you’ve been consorting with a pretty stranger?”

“I’m not stupid enough to invite a demon inside,” Sam said.

“I know. I can feel that place practically vibrating with all the warding,” Meg replied, jerking her head towards the house. “You can put me in the Devil’s Trap you have underneath the carpet if it makes you feel better, but you shouldn’t even bother. Queen of Hell has made it pretty clear any demon that comes near you or your family with ill intent will have to answer to her.”

“Then, how come you’re here?” Sam repeated.

Meg shrugged.

“I must not have ill intents.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” Meg twisted her mouth and stared up at the sky for a few seconds, as if she was gathering her strength. “Fine. I… need some help.”

“With what?”

“Getting to Heaven.”

That at least made him curious enough to open the gate. He let Meg go first, because he was smarter than to turn his back on her. She stepped inside the garage and stopped in her tracks before looking up at the Devil’s Trap etched in the ceiling.

“Smart. Can I at least get a chair and something to drink? On account of me dying for your ass that one time?”

Sam pulled two lawn chairs, placing one into the trap and the other one right outside it. He also fished a couple of beers from the mini-fridge he’d installed there. He didn’t know why he was treating Meg as if they were truly old friends, but she was right. She had died for them.

Although the both knew it hadn’t been for _them_ , exactly.

“Start from the beginning,” Sam told her once they were both sat.

Meg started by taking a long swig from her bottle.

“In the beginning, I woke up in a cold, dark place, staring at my own face. _She_ told me that someone had called me and kicked me out of there, along with some others.”

“Others?” Sam repeated, frowning. “You mean…”

“My father and the Other Princes are still harmlessly slumbering in there. Lilith, Alistair, Abaddon, Cain, they all are,” she said. She took another swig. “In fact, I think the only ones who got out were me, Crowley and your old gal Ruby.”

Ruby alone was bad enough, but Sam was relieved to hear that at least most of the big demons they had defeated remained gone.

“Crowley?” he repeated. “So, was it… Rowena who woke you?”

“Not according to her. And of course, the Shadow wasn’t in a chatty mood to tell any more. I had to track down Death herself so I could get some intel. In fact, I had to trap a reaper and _make_ a new Death. According to her, the only one with enough mojo to pull someone out of the Empty would be either a Nephilim, an archangel… or the Big G. And as I understand it, your _other_ boy fits all of those criteria.”

Sam fidgeted with the bottle in his hand. If Meg had talked to Rowena, that meant she was aware of… everything.

But at least she didn’t make any sarcastic comment this time.

“Why would he?” Sam asked in the end.

“I have no clue,” Meg admitted. “But if Ruby is to be believed, an old pal of ours had something to do with it.”

“Who?”

Meg took another swig of the beer. Longer this time. Sam had never seen her so hesitant, so… almost scared.

“Castiel,” she said in the end.

Sam slumped back on his chair.

Meg’s presence alone was enough to reopen a lot of wounds, but the fact she was bringing up Jack and Cas… it was almost too much to bear. He had a new life, he had got out of hunting, like he had always wanted, but the past had a way to sneak up on him again and again.

That wasn’t Meg’s fault, he realized. Eileen was still hunting. His son carried his brother’s name. The past still weighed on him, no matter how much he wanted not to think about it anymore.

The demon stared at him from inside the trap, waiting silently.

“The… last I knew of Cas was that he had…” Sam started mumbling.

“Sam, think about it for two seconds, will you? If your boy is the new God, what would be the first thing he did?”

The first thing Jack had done with his powers had been bringing Castiel back. It made absolute sense that he had done it again.

“Then, why hasn’t he come to see me?” Sam continued asking. “To tell me that he’s fine, that he’s alive. I’ve… prayed to him.”

“So have I,” Meg confessed. “It seems they are not talking any calls up there for the time being.”

They went silent again, drinking their beers. Despite everything, despite the differences and the blood spilt between them, Sam knew that at least here they were both thinking the same thing.

Why wouldn’t Cas talk to them?

That was too painful a question to think about, so Sam made another:

“You and Crowley, I get. But why Ruby?”

“If she’s to be believed, she made a deal with Cas: that he would take her out of the Empty in exchange for her telling him the location of some… weird mystical marble you needed for the quest of the week or something.” Meg shrugged. “Honestly, I stopped paying attention to the details. All I wanted was to talk to the angel, but he wouldn’t answer.”

“So… your next plan is… going to Heaven?”

“Yes.”

She said it like it was the only possible conclusion to everything she had been through.

“Are you sure?”

“What else am I going to do?” Meg shrugged again. “I can’t stay in Hell pretending we’re one big happy family and I can’t exactly start another civil war. The old loyalists are all gone, and unlike Crowley, Rowena is not half bad at her job. I’m not going back to the Empty. Earth is fun, but not as interesting as when your brother and you were breaking it every other year. Heaven’s the only place left for me to go.”

That all sounded like pretenses, excuses Meg would tell to anyone who asked why she wanted that. But Sam wasn’t just anyone, so he stared at her until Meg finished up her beer and decided to tell the truth.

“And it’s the only way I can think of to see my angel again and ask him why.”

“Why he brought you back?”

“Why he even cared to.”

“He did care about you, Meg.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he just felt like he owed me, like he owed Ruby.” Meg looked down at her bottle and for a second, for the fraction of a second, Sam saw exactly how sad, how desperate that very thought made her. Then she looked up, smirking once again, and it was gone. “Either way, I intend to find out.”

“Okay.” Sam figured there was no point in digging into Meg’s feelings further. “So how do you plan to get there?”

“Well, that’s where you come in,” she said, as if it was obvious. “I’m gonna have to take the long way up, but I can’t do it like this.”

“Like what?”

Meg slowly tilted her head as her eyes went pitch black.

Right, of course.

“I know you know of a way to fix this,” she continued. “A cure. Something to make me human.”

Sam swallowed and suddenly lamented not having another beer at hand.

“Meg, the cure… it’s painful and it could be…”

“I know. Crowley said as much.”

“You could die.”

“That’s the plan. To die as a human.”

“You could die before we finish the treatment,” Sam explained. “Or you could die right after. Your body’s been through a lot and without your powers sustaining it…”

Meg blinked and her eyes looked normal again, brown, and big… and pleading.

“Sam, please. You have to help me. You’re the only one who can.” She made a pause and took a deep breath. “You’re the only one I _trust_.”

Sam should have refused. He knew he should have. He had left that life behind, as much as he could when Eileen was still hunting and Claire still called him when she needed information about a monster she’d never seen before. But he had promised he wouldn’t put himself in that sort of danger again, for his son.

Then again… in a strange way, he also trusted Meg. He believed her when she said this was all in order to see Cas again. He was sure he was telling the truth when she said only he could help her. This really shouldn’t be dangerous to him, should it?

“I’m going to need to make some calls.”

“Sure.” Meg raised her empty bottle. “Can I have another one of these while you do?”

It took a painfully short time of going through his old contact book to get everything he needed. After it was settled, he went upstairs.

“Dean?” he called out, but his son’s room was empty and a mess, as usual, with his favorite toys spread out on the carpet.

He wasn’t in the bathroom or on his and Eileen’s room, flicking through the TV channels as he used to do sometimes. Sam checked his office, as he had caught Dean more than once drawing on his papers, and then went back downstairs.

“Dean?”

There were voices coming from the garage. He stopped and listened.

“You knew my Uncle Dean?”

“Oh, yeah. He was a pain in my… backside.”

“Daddy says he was a very brave man who saved a lot of people.”

“You know, I reckon your dad is right. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t a pain in the backside. The duality of man, as you’ll learn soon enough.”

“You speak funny.”

“And you’re funny little gremlin, aren’t you?”

“Dean!” Sam called as he entered the garage. Dean startled and looked up at him, his brown eyes filling up with guilt. Sam knelt in front of him and used his gentlest tone: “Hey. You need to go pack a bag, okay? Meg and I have something to take care of and you’re going to be staying with Aunt Jody tonight.”

Dean’s face lit up immediately.

“Yay! I love Aunt Jody!”

“I know. Go pack. Don’t forget your toothbrush.”

“Cute kid you got there, Sammy,” Meg commented.

Sam glared at her, but he figured there was no point in asking her not to call him that. He grabbed the ladder and broke the Trap so she could stay up.

“Let’s go,” he said, heading for his truck.

“We’re not going to take that one?” Meg asked, pointing at the form of the Impala, hidden underneath its cover.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I said no!”

Meg was taken aback for a second, but then she shrugged.

“Gotcha. Forget I asked.”

Dean was back a few moments later and patiently waited for Sam to check his backpack to make sure he hadn’t put on just toys or forgot something important. Sam checked to make sure all the windows and doors were closed and they went on their way.

It was a five hours drive, with a one-hour stop at a Biggersons by the side of the road so Dean could have lunch and a bathroom break. He spent a lot of the first hour asking Meg questions (“How did you meet my dad and my Uncle Dean? You don’t look as old as them. Did you save people too?”) that at least she was tactful enough to answer vaguely and evasively. The second hour, perhaps realizing he wasn’t going to get much information from her, he spent it playing on his tablet and after the stop at the Biggersons, taking a nap until they were at Jody’s door.

“Aunt Jody!”

“Hey, there, shortie!” Jody greeted him, picking him up to give him a quick hug as soon as Dean ran out of the truck. “Uf, not so short anymore, are we?”

“The doctor said I grew three inches!” Dean announced proudly.

“Really? You’re gonna be as tall as your dad!” Jody exclaimed, running a hand through his hair. “Go inside and say hi to the girls, okay?”

“Okay. Bye, daddy!” Dean said. He skipped towards the door, his backpack hitting rhythmically against his back.

“Thank you for this, Jody,” Sam started.

“No, no, no, don’t give me that.” Jody gave him a look that rooted Sam to his spot. “Who’s that one?”

Meg was still on the truck, pointedly ignoring them as she manipulated the radio. Sam chose his words very carefully. If he told Jody that she was a demon, that was a surefire way to get Eileen called on him.

“She’s… she’s an old friend. From… you know.”

“Ah-huh.” Jody raised an eyebrow on him. “And what is this urgent business you need to attend to, and why does Alex need to steal blood from the hospital for it?”

Sam realized he’d had five hours to come up with a decent excuse and he’d neglected to do it. In any case, he could never lie to Jody. She would always see right through him.

“Sam?” Jody put a hand on his shoulder, as if to make him look at her. “It’s not a hunt, is it?”

“It’s not,” Sam assured her, and at least on this he could tell her the truth. “I won’t be in any danger, I promise. I’ll come back before Eileen does and pick Dean tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’ll call me tomorrow morning,” Jody said. It didn’t sound like a question.

“Yes. Of course.”

Jody let go of him, though she didn’t look happy about it.

“Good luck.”

Alex was waiting for them in the hospital’s backdoor, with the coolers ready. She shot him a look that she had definitely picked up from Jody.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but _be careful_.”

“Always am,” Sam said. He didn’t realize until later that those were the same words Eileen had said that morning.

“Where to now?” Meg asked once he was back in the truck.

“You’re not going to like it,” Sam warned her as he turned the engine back on.

He was right. As soon as they parked in front of the church, Meg let out a huff.

“Really? Isn’t all of this like, obsolete now?”

“Some rituals still hold the same power,” Sam explained, with a shrug. “People give it power with their belief.”

“So what, you’re saying if I don’t believe in this cure, it won’t work?”

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to go through with it,” Sam pointed out. “It’s not too late to back down. We can go to a bar and get some beers, maybe a pizza…”

“Look, I’m not saying no, but aren’t you married?”

“All I’m saying is,” Sam replied, because there was no point in explaining to her that he hadn’t meant it like that, “you don’t _have_ to.”

Meg took a deep breath and looked at the church again. The stained glass shone bright under the twilight sun, making it almost look like the building was on fire.

“No,” she said. “I tracked you down, I humiliated myself into asking for your help. I’m going all the way. Let’s do it.”

She opened the door and strode towards the entrance with confidence. Sam grabbed the coolers and followed her in.

Father Olmos was waiting for them in full garb.

“Hello, Sam,” he said, shaking his hand.

“Father. Thank you for having everything ready in such a short notice.”

“It’s fine. Where is the…?” he started asking. His eyes darted towards Meg, who remained silent and uncomfortable standing in the middle of the pews.

“It’s going to be a different kind of exorcism,” Sam explained. “It’ll take some hours and… I’m gonna need you to bless this blood.”

Father Olmos seemed surprised, but he did as Sam had asked. He then handed him the keys to the church’s basement.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? When fighting evil, it is always better to have back up.”

“I appreciate the offer, but we can handle it.”

And besides, he knew Meg wouldn’t want another witness to what was about to happen. Father Olmos gave him his blessing before leaving the church. Sam locked the doors and beckoned for Meg to follow him down the stairs.

“Oh, kinky,” she commented when they entered.

The place was designed to keep demons in check. There was a Devil’s Trap burned on the floor and an iron chair standing in the middle, with chains and straps to hold the person being exorcised in. Sam and Dean had only seen Father Olmos in action a few times, and since Rowena had taken over Hell, things had gone quiet in the demonic front.

But Father Olmos had kept the dungeon, just in case.

“So, how do we go about this?”

Sam pointed out at the chair and Meg wrinkled her nose.

“Is that necessary?”

“You said you trusted me, Meg. Again, the cure is dangerous and painful. This is for your safety as much as mine.”

Meg sighed, but she stepped decidedly into the Trap and sat down. She didn’t even make a quip when Sam adjusted the straps around her arms and legs.

“It’s almost nine o’clock,” Sam said as he prepared the first blood injection. “Early tomorrow morning, you’ll be cured.”

“Or maybe I’ll be dead,” Meg said, with a shrug. “It’ll be interesting to find out.”

Sam sank the needle on her neck and pressed the plunger down. Meg grimaced when the blood entered her veins, but she didn’t make a sound.

“A bit of optimism never hurt anybody.”

“You could have at least brought me something to read,” Meg complained.

However, they both knew they couldn’t focus on anything else.

The second and third injections also seemed to be mild on Meg. She flinched at them both, but she didn’t complain much.

“Are you sure it’s working? I don’t… feel any different.”

“Give it time,” Sam said.

After the fourth injection, he started feeling tired. It had been a long day of driving. Years before, he could have driven for much longer, slept in the car and still felt rested enough to investigate around the town, interrogate witnesses and the like. Nowadays, he had to save his energy to keep up with his son when he ran around the garden.

He was older than Dean had been when he died now.

Those were the kind of bleak thoughts that came to him in the dead of night. He would sometimes roll over and nuzzle against Eileen’s body or stand up to gently open Dean’s door and watch him asleep in his bed. To remind himself that he still had something there with him. That life wasn’t over just because he’d lost his brother.

He startled awake when his cellphone’s alarm indicated another hour had passed. He prepared the injection and approached Meg.

She seemed pale and her eyes were bloodshot when she raised them at him.

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” Sam asked, frowning.

“I… was talking about Dean, and… calling you Sammy and… you miss him. Obviously, you miss him, and I kept poking at you. I…” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry he’s dead, Sam. I’m sorry I even brought it up.”

Sam didn’t know how to even answer that. He had been given condolences left and right when the news of Dean’s death, but never one that seemed so… sorrowful.

Meg blinked the tears accumulating in her eyes away.

“Ah, crap,” she mumbled. “This is it, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s working.”

“I hate it. Why did I think it was a good idea?”

Sam grabbed her by the chin and injected the blood again. This time, Meg let out a strangled moan of pain.

“You’re doing great, Meg,” he reassured her.

She stifled a sob.

Sam couldn’t fall asleep afterwards. He watched Meg closely, as she alternated between crying and going still, her chin falling down against her chest as if she was trying to sleep, to rest. Only for her to start crying once more a few moments later.

After the seventh shot, at four in the morning, Sam felt up her wrist. It was faint and slow, but he could feel it.

A pulse.

Maybe for the first time since Meg had taken possession of it, the meatsuit’s heart was beating again.

“Meg?” he called gently.

Meg’s lips were bleeding. She had bitten them so hard not to scream.

“It… it burns,” she said, with a broken voice. “Sam, it burns.”

The straps rattled when she moved her arms, but she was either too weak or in too much pain to really get them off. Sam realized she must have been quietly enduring the pain all that time, taking it in without letting show how much she was suffering.

But now she was finally breaking.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Sam told her. “You have just one more to go and then it’ll be over.”

“Why?” she asked, shaking her head. “Why did I do this?”

“For Cas, remember? So you could see Cas again.”

“What if I do all of this and he doesn’t… he doesn’t want to see me?” she asked. “I did so many horrible things. How the hell I’m going to make up for all of it? How am I gonna get to Heaven when I killed, I… tortured so many people! You. Your brother. Your friends. I… I killed your friends! So many of them, and I…”

The despair in her voice broke Sam’s heart a little.

“Meg. Meg, listen to me.” Sam put a hand on her cheek and made her look up at him. “Cas knew all of that. He could see you. He knew what you were and he still forgave you. He still cared.”

“Did he?” Her sarcastic laughter was but a shadow of the way she used to laugh. “That’s why he couldn’t even be bothered to answer when I got back? When I called and prayed to him and…?”

“Meg…”

“Am I an idiot for thinking he could love me?!”

“No,” Sam assured her, before he could even think about what he was saying. “Of course not.”

Meg let out another short laugh that was soon overtaken by another sob. Sam stayed by her side, petting her hair and letting her cry, assuring her over and over that it was fine, that it would be alright.

She had calmed down a little by the time his phone rang, announcing it was five in the morning. Sam prepared the last injection.

“How are you doing?” he asked her.

Meg’s face was a mess of tears and anguish, her clothes were rumpled and she seemed… so tired. Sam had never thought a demon could look so tired and sad.

Then again, Meg was on the brink of not being a demon anymore.

“You know how old I am, Sam?” she asked. Her voice sounded calm, but the undercurrent of despair was still present. “I was at Jerusalem, whispering on a man’s ear that thirty pieces of silver were well worth his friend’s life. I saw so many temples fall down, I prayed to so many forgotten gods. Azazel handpicked me to do his will and I followed every single one of his commands for thousands of years. There’s so much blood on my hands. I can never wash it off. Even if you plunge that needle on me right now, I can never… I was so stupid to think…”

“Meg…”

“That’s not my name,” she pointed out. “It’s the name of a girl whose life I took.”

“What is your name, then?”

Meg blinked a little.

“I can’t remember,” she said and then she laughed again. It was a hollow, broken sound. “It’s been so long…”

Sam knelt in front of her again.

“You’re Meg to me,” he said. “You are to Meg to Castiel. You can honor that name by becoming better, by trying to get into Heaven. I believe you can do it.”

“Why?”

“Because, even as a demon, you were capable of love.”

Meg didn’t say anything, but her lower lip started trembling as if she was about to break into tears again.

“Meg? I need to give you the last injection, or the effects of the cure are going to start fading,” Sam warned her. “Can I do it? Is it okay?”

Meg didn’t say anything. She closed her eyes… and then nodded.

Sam was careful when pushing the plunger. He watched as the last drops of blessed blood disappeared under Meg’s skin.

After it was done, he grabbed the communion chalice and emptied the last bag in it. Meg still had her eyes closed when he approached her with it and placed in front of her.

“You have to drink this now,” he instructed her. “For it to be completed…”

Meg’s eyes were pitch black when she opened them and settled them on it. However, she opened her lips, just barely and Sam pressed the chalice against them. Meg swallowed, at least two generous gulps. Some of it slid down her chin and dripped her shirt, but she didn’t care. When Sam moved the chalice away, she looked more demonic than ever, with her eyes hollow and her lips stained red.

For a fraction of a second, he feared he had failed her.

Then she breathed in deeply and her eyes turned back to brown. When he looked for the heartbeat on her neck, he found it pounding strong and rhythmical.

“It’s over.”

Meg didn’t say anything. She didn’t move as he loosened the straps, and barely reacted when he grabbed her arm and gently helped her to her feet.

“Are you okay?”

“That’s… a complicated question,” she replied. Her voice still sounded shaky.

Sam grabbed his bag and the coolers as Meg moved with unsteady steps towards the stairs. She must have been faster than she looked, because by the time Sam looked again, she had disappeared.

“Meg?” he called her. Crap, what if she’d left the church? What if she had taken his truck or gone somewhere to…?

But he found her kneeling in front of the altar, her hands clasped together and her head bowed, solemnly.

He watched her in silence until she raised her eyes again and grabbed unto the nearest pew to stand up. She looked around the church, disappointment settling down on her features.

“He’s still not answering.”

She didn’t need to clarify who she meant.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? You did everything I asked you to.”

Sam didn’t want to say it hadn’t worked. He knew Castiel and he didn’t understand why he wouldn’t come. He didn’t want to think it was because they had been wrong and he was still, after all, trapped in that awful place.

“How do you feel?” he asked again.

“I… I think I’m…” Meg started saying, but a growling interrupted them. She put a hand on her own stomach. “Hungry.” She scoffed and then let out a soft chuckle. “I’m hungry. That’s just so…”

“Human?” Sam suggested.

Meg looked at him like she was going to smack him, so he didn’t insist. Instead, he took her to the closest diner he could find. It was six in the morning and the waitress also looked like she hadn’t slept all night. She barely looked at them as she served them their coffee and toasts. Meg nibbled at them and made a face, but kept eating in pensive silence.

“So… what are you going to do now?”

“How’s that any of your business?” Meg snapped. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed out. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I… I really don’t know. How long do you think I have left? A couple of decades? Thirty years, forty?” She surrounded the mug of coffee with her hands and looked intently into the dark liquid, as if she would find the answers there. “I guess I will have to find something to do in that time, huh? Maybe join a convent to hedge my bets.”

“You wouldn’t last in a convent.”

For the first time since she had first appeared outside of his home, Meg smiled. A sincere smile, devoid of any of her usual sarcasm.

“No, I don’t think I would.”

She was still Meg, but also… different. Calmer. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. She had always been so… well, he believed the word Castiel had used was “thorny”. Some of that was still there, but also, she seemed a little more relaxed. Like some of those walls had finally come down.

And she had only been human for a couple of hours.

“How did it feel?” he asked, because he couldn’t help his curiosity. “When you were being cured, how did it feel?”

Meg drank up from her cup before answering.

“A little like being around my angel again.” She made a pause before elaborating: “Something like me… like what I was, corrupted and twisted, wasn’t supposed to be in the presence of something holy like him. I could feel it, every time he touched me, every time he… it was like something in me recoiled, but I wanted it anyway. Like my soul remembered what it used to be when I was around him and longed for that again. It hurt, but it was good. He made me feel… clean. Does that make sense?”

She didn’t wait for him to confirm if it did. Instead, she settled back in her chair and sighed.

“It was like that, but times a hundred. I burned alive from the inside out, Sam, and suddenly all of my darkness was… gone. And even though now I’m weighed down by all the evil crap I did, I hope it doesn’t come back.”

Sam nodded. He hoped for that, too. He hoped that Meg would find her way to Heaven, somehow.

“I think we should find a motel and…”

“You’re still married, Sam.”

“I was going to say, sleep for a couple of hours before we go pick up my son,” Sam said, though he couldn’t help the chuckle. “Then I guess we’ll drive back home and…”

He stopped in his tracks when he realized Meg wasn’t following him back to the truck.

“Meg?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I should come with you,” she said, sinking her hands in her pockets. “You have your life and I guess I’m realizing it was selfish of me to come drag you out of it. Especially after everything I did to you.”

“Forget it. All of that is in the past.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I did try to kill you,” Meg pointed out. “Repeatedly.”

“Well… you were literally a different person then.” Sam shrugged. “Listen, just come stay with us for a while? I’m sure Eileen won’t mind.”

Meg considered it for a few seconds, but then shook her head.

“No. You’ve already done more than enough for me. More than I deserved, anyway.”

Sam was sure Meg had not thought this through. She had basic human needs now, like food and shelter. Where was she going to get the money for that? Was she going to get a job? She was going to need IDs and a phone…

“Hold up,” he said.

He jumped into the truck and open the glove compartment. He found a wallet with a couple hundred dollars and one of Charlie’s fake credit cards, along with a phone with a cracked screen. He went back and handed it all to Meg.

“This is to help you,” he said, as he put everything in her hands. “My number is in the contact list for that phone, so if you ever need anything…”

Meg looked at the objects like she didn’t know what they were, but then she understood. She slid them inside of her pockets and looked up at him again. Before he knew what was happening, she had wrapped her arms around his neck and was pulling him down for a hug.

“Thank you, Sam.”

Sam hugged her back. Because being human in that world was scary and everybody needed a friend. Because being willing to change, to try and be better when the easiest thing would’ve been not to… well, in Sam’s mind, that already meant Meg deserved Heaven.

They broke away a few seconds later and Sam pretended he didn’t see how Meg wiped her tears with the sleeve of her jacket.

“I mean it. Don’t hesitate to call.”

“I’ll be fine,” she promised him. “But also, if you ever see my angel…”

“I’ll tell him.”

Meg nodded.

And there was nothing left to say.

Sam headed back to his truck and got in. Meg was still standing outside of the diner, but she wasn’t looking at him even as he watched her through his rearview mirror. She had her eyes lifted up to the sky. The early morning sun shone in her hair. She seemed… peaceful.

Then Sam took a turn around the corner and she disappeared from his view.


	2. Chapter 2

It was not easy.

Meg wasn’t expecting it to be, sure, but she hadn’t expected it to be _that_ not easy.

She lived in a motel for about six weeks. In that time, it felt like all she did was eat, and sleep, and take showers, and just… exist.

Not that there was something wrong with that. There were a few good moments in there too. Like, waking up warm and happy, wrapped in her bedsheets, feeling rested and amazing. Like the first sip of coffee that burned her tongue or the first bite of her food after hours of not sleeping. Like the water drumming against her muscles. It was… nice. It was good. She hadn’t realized such small things could feel this great.

But it wasn’t easy to get used to needing those things. Food was great, but was it really necessary for her to get lightheaded if she skipped one meal? And she would have liked to go to sleep when she wanted to, not when her eyes started to feel heavy and the world around her began to seem unreal.

She also wasn’t a fan of hangovers. She found out those were a thing she could have now, when she decided to treat herself to a bottle of whiskey and only made it to halfway through before she blacked out. Her body was a lightweight now. This being human thing had a lot of downsides, that was for sure.

Eventually, the money Sam had given her ran out and she couldn’t keep using that fake credit card forever. Not that credit card fraud was the worst thing she could do, all things considered, but she had the feeling that eventually she would get caught and she didn’t want to risk it. She liked her life of freedom.

And she was trying to be good and all that jazz, too, she guessed.

She read newspapers and browsed the news on her phone. She rented a car (she considered just up and stealing one, but she decided against it for the same reasons she didn’t feel great using the credit card for longer than she had to) and left Sioux Falls, heading west.

She didn’t go far, though. She was looking for something very specific and she only had to follow the trail of bodies and weird cases, and there she was. In Sandlow, Wyoming (population: some fifteen hundred souls), she found a hunter’s bar called The Hungry Lion, which was a terrible name, but nobody asked her. The owner was a man named Peter who looked at her weirdly when she asked him if he had job for her.

“This isn’t your average bar. We’re not in the habit of taking in little girls lost.”

“I have references,” Meg replied.

“Yeah? What references?”

“Sam Winchester.”

The entire conversation in the bar died down and all the looks turned towards him.

“Sam Winchester?” Peter repeated and guffawed like Meg had just told him the best damn joke in his entire time. “That guy’s dead.”

“No, you must have him confused. Dean is the one who is dead.”

“They’re both dead,” Peter settled, with a shrug.

Meg grabbed a pen and a napkin and wrote down a number.

“Want to call him and check out?”

Peter narrowed his little beady eyes at her, but he took the number and disappeared out back.

“Do you really know Sam Winchester?” someone asked her.

“Oh, yes. We go way back,” Meg replied.

She was fully aware that the age her meatsuit appeared to be would make them suspicious, but apparently, hunters never lost their thirst for tall tales. Three different guys offered to pay for her drinks if she told them about Sam before Pete returned looking like a bulldog that had just bit his own tail.

“So? Was it true?” one of the hunters asked.

“I talked to _a_ guy who _said_ he was Sam Winchester,” Peter said. He took a shot glass from underneath the counter and ostensibly poured a shot from a flask adorned with a big cross in it. He slid it towards Meg and waited.

Well, there it was, wasn’t it? If all the eating and sleeping didn’t convince her, that had to be the last test.

She grabbed the glass and downed it, fully aware that at least a couple of those hunters must have had angel blades with her and would be ready to sink it on her if she even so much as flinched.

She didn’t. It tasted exactly like normal water.

Peter still didn’t look happy, but he said:

“You start tomorrow. Minimum wage plus tips.”

“Fine by me.”

It wasn’t a glamorous job, but then again, not much about being human really was.

She cleaned tables, served beer, listened to bad jokes and exaggerated accounts of how many werewolves and vampires had each of them killed. Every now and then, she had to walk a hunter who couldn’t hold his beer back to the nearby motel (where she had more or less rented a room permanently) or slap a wandering hand away from her ass, but other than that, this wasn’t a bad a place to grow old in.

Peter had. Despite his initial coldness towards her, he softened up when he realized she worked hard and kept to herself.

“What’s your story, Meg?” he asked her. “How did a pretty girl like you met an old geezer like Sam Winchester well enough for him to vouch for you?”

“Maybe I only appear to be a pretty girl, have you ever considered that?”

He had, of course. Meg had noticed the way he kept handing her silver spoons and iron keys, placing religious items here and there to test her. He never found anything, of course, and Meg never told him the truth. Peter was a blabbermouth and the moment someone heard about a demon cure, was the moment they would want to try it. And for someone who didn’t have Sam’s mental fortitude and a demon actually willing to be cured, well, the ending couldn’t be as happy as hers had been.

Meg didn’t need more blood on her hands.

Not human blood, at least. She didn’t lead the charge, but when someone needed backup, she was more than willing to point a shotgun the right way or show up in a car with a first aid kit. She soon developed a reputation for being someone the boys at the bar could call if they were in need of help.

She called them boys, even though most of them were grown men capable to throw a punch against something bigger and meaner than them. Sometimes a kid (a literal kid, maybe not even old enough to have a legal drink yet) would walk in and try to tell stories along with the older, more experienced men. Sometimes women walked in there too, or married couples. There were handful of regulars, but most came, bought supplies for the job they were handling from Pete, and left. Some, they never saw again. Meg hoped against all hope that meant they had done the job and got out of dodge.

Sometimes they had to light a funeral pyre in the backyard woods of the bar. Those days, the bar would be somber and quiet.

“I’m getting too old for this,” Pete commented one day, after one of those funerals. “Meg, if I take all of my savings and retire to Florida, do you think you can handle yourself here?”

“What the hell are you gonna do in Florida? Wrestle alligators?” Meg shot back as she scrubbed a stain of something (was it blood?) from the countertop. “Don’t be silly. You’re going to be kicking around for a long time.”

“It’s not about how long I have left,” Peter said, with a sigh and a shot of whiskey. “It’s about how I’m tired of all the fighting and the death, you get me?”

Meg got it.

She’d thought she would miss it. The violence, the anger, the fighting. She had lived for it when she was a demon. There was something so raw about slashing a throat, about hearing a bone cracking between her hands. There was a power to it and she had delighted in it for a long time.

She didn’t, anymore. Just a few weeks prior, she had killed a couple of vampires. The machete’s blade had slid clean through their necks, cutting muscle and bone in a single sweep. When their bodies dropped to the floor and the head rolled away from her, she felt… nothing. No exhilaration, no ecstasy. The adrenaline from the fight was still pumping in her veins, but she felt cold as the blood splattered on her face.

There was this horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that this was not what she was meant to do. That it was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. She had rationalized it later. The vampire was practically feral, it had left at least half a dozen bodies in its wake as it approached their town.

But she didn’t enjoy killing it. Not it, nor the shapeshifter that tried to pass off as one of their regular hunters, nor the ghouls that infected the cemetery. It was as if her bloodlust had burned away in that church’s basement along with so many other things.

She would kill if she had to, of course, because there were some things in that world that needed killing. But she wouldn’t enjoy it.

“I think I’m just too old for this,” she commented one time, late at night after she’d come back from one those hunts, while Peter counted the money collected that day.

“How old are you again?” he asked her, frowning at her.

Meg took a swig of her vodka (it turned that, with enough practice, she could learn to hold her liquor reasonably well) and shrugged.

“Older than Christianity. I don’t remember exactly. The body is like, early thirties, I think?”

“Yeah.” Peter shut the register off and put some of the bills directly into his wallet. “You shouldn’t be talking like that, girl. Some people might get ideas and I would hate to have to mop your blood off my floor.”

“You say the sweetest things, Pete,” Meg replied, with a sarcastic smile.

But he was right. It took a year or two of her keeping her head down before the regulars simply accepted that she was who she pretended to be: just a runaway girl who had run afoul of some supernatural creatures. No one asked for her story. No one asked for anybody’s stories in that anonymous little bar. Kill counts and victories, that anybody could brag about.

But no one asked what their first hunt had been like, if it had been a hunt at all.

Every now and then, she would hear some familiar names. Jody Mills, Claire Novak, some others scattered here and there. Demons seemed to have become a rare hunt and angels… well, no one seemed too sure if angels were ever real or not.

"No, I swear, I know someone who saw them one time!" someone would say every once in a while. "I know someone who killed one!"

"Nonsense!" some other hunter would say when the topic came up. "No way. Angels are way too powerful, even more than demons. You'll get lucky if you can your hands on a blade, but having one and sinking it on an angel are two different things."

"Well, Meg knows Sam Winchester," a third person would intervene. "And that guy killed a lot of angels! Isn't that right, Meg? Him and his brother."

"I heard they had an angel pet that would help them sometimes."

"Now, you're just making stuff up!"

"Yeah," Meg would say, smiling to herself. "That's crazy. Why would an angel just help a couple of random hunters?"

They didn’t need to bring him up, though. She thought about him every day.

She tried not to. She tried to do her job, keep her head down, laugh and live and go on as if she truly was what she pretended to be. But then, she would see a man on the street wearing a tan coat, or she would look up at the sky and the color would remind her of his eyes. She would hear about the Winchesters' angel pet that no one was sure if it even existed or not, and she would feel a pang in her heart that reminded her that it had all been for nothing. She had renounced to her darkness, to her powers, to her immortality, on the off chance that she could see him again.

And he was still not answering to any of her prayers.

Not for a lack of trying, certainly. Every day, early in the morning while she was putting on her make up, or late at night when Peter had left her to handle closing time by herself, as she put the chairs back in her place and cleaned up the glasses and put away the empty bottles, she would mumble a little prayer for him. Sometimes she would be angry at him, calling him an asshole for not coming to see her, sometimes she would scream and threaten to never talk to him again if he didn't show up right at that instant. Most times, however, she spoke to him like she would as if he actually bothered showing up: she would tell him about her day, about Peter, about the hunters she had met that day that had gone away, the ridiculous stories she heard about Sam and Dean and even Castiel himself.

Yes, someone who knew what she was doing would think it was a little pathetic. Like continuously texting a guy who always left her on read, but Meg kept on doing it.

"You can't ignore me forever," she would tell him. "Well, I mean, I guess you can, but come on. At some point, I'm going to die, and hopefully, I'm going to go up there and I'm going to find you. And then you're going to have to hear me whether you want it or not."

He didn't answer to her threats either.

And it was really screwing with her mind that she couldn't shake this habit of praying to Castiel. It was screwing with other habits that she thought she would keep even if she became human.

Namely, her habit of having sex with anyone she found attractive.

It was odd. She would see a handsome guy at the bar, someone blonde or with green eyes, or a pretty girl with brown hair, someone who definitely didn't remind her of Castiel. Someone as different from him as she could pick them. Sometimes they would hit on her, sometimes she hit on them.

And sometimes, they stayed back after the bar was closed to have a couple more drinks with her, because, where was the damage in that, really? She would let them put their hands on her knee, tell her just how pretty she was, compliment her lips or her hair. Sometimes she went as far as to kiss them, to taste their mouths and let their hands roam under her shirt. It felt good, the heat on her skin, her heart pounding faster against her ribcage, their breaths on her neck. Her body had certain needs, certain desires that were just as basic and animalistic as everything else she had to learn how to do when she was freshly human.

But then, inevitably, when she led them back to her small motel room, at the door or even when they were in bed, hot and heavy and getting rid of those pesky clothes, she realized that something wasn’t clicking with her.

It was empty. It was meaningless.

She had gone through with it sometimes, because she didn’t want to earn the reputation of being a fucking tease, but she’d had to fake it. Once they rolled off of her and fell asleep by her side, she felt relieved that it was over, more than anything else.

No, orgasms were fine. She had no problem getting them in the shower or by herself at night to let off some steam before going to sleep. The problem was _people_ , it was their presence, it was their hands. It was knowing these weren’t just bodies, that they had thoughts and feelings and desires that she would never get to know about in those few moments of physical connection. It was that they would never know or understand her either.

Castiel had known her. He’d known what she was and maybe he could imagine the things she had done. Sam had said so and Meg believed it.

She wished she could call Sam up sometime, tell him about all the things she was finding out, about humanity, about herself. About how it was much more complicated than she had thought it would be. For example, she had absolutely no desire or intention to have sex with Peter, but she still felt a great deal of affection for the old asshole, when he would try to act paternal towards her, or when he would ask her if she was fine.

“I am, don’t worry,” Meg would tell him, as she rubbed her lower back.

The pain had started so subtly that she wouldn’t have been able to tell when exactly it did. She tired more easily and sometimes she would fin it hard to get out of bed. There were good days, and then there were days where she would feel like she was walking through jello, like her limbs were heavy and wouldn’t respond the way they were supposed to.

Peter insisted over and over that she needed a medical check-up, which Meg rejected over and over. Those weren’t exactly cheap and being a waitress at a hunters’ bar didn’t pay well enough to go to the doctor for no reason at all.

“It’s just a bit of pain, don’t worry about it,” she would say, over and over, no matter how much he insisted. “It’ll go away after I get some rest, you’ll see.”

“You always say that, but it keeps coming back,” Peter would point out. “That’s not normal, you know.”

Meg had no idea what it was normal or not, but it did pain a little that after she had cared for this body for so long. She had dressed it, fed it, given it its proper rest and exercise (if running after werewolves could be considered exercise), she had even tried to give it pleasure now and then. Why was it suddenly acting up like this?

She preferred to ignore it as much as she could, but her body wouldn’t let up. One evening when a group of six or seven hunters had just returned from a successful raid on a Rugaru camp, she was serving shots and nachos and laughing at them, eyeing one with a cute beard and wondering if maybe this time sex wouldn’t feel so bad, when her legs decided to just stop working.

She had no idea what was happening until she was sliding towards the floor, the food and drinks she had on her hand clattering on the floor. She waved her arms to try and stop herself, but gravity was faster. Her head hit painfully against the countertop and for a second or two, all that existed was the pain reverberating inside of her skull.

Then someone was grabbing her by the arm to try to get her on her feet and several voices were asking her if she was okay. Meg looked around and didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know who all these men were, she didn’t know why they kept touching her.

Was she in Hell again?

“Let go of me!” she screamed out.

Instantly, all the hands moved away. They weren’t speaking anymore, but staring at her with a mixture of confusion and concern.

“Girl, you’re bleeding,” Peter said.

Meg blinked and realized there was a red drip inside of her eye. She realized she was in the small hunters’ bar she had called home for the last… how long had it been? Three years? Four?

Someone pressed a handkerchief to the cut in her forehead and suddenly it was all coming back to her.

“It’s nothing,” she reassured them. “It was an accident. I tripped with my own feet, don’t worry about it.”

They worried about it anyway. Peter, especially, did.

At least three of their regulars (Kyle, Thomas and Gus) went back with her to her motel bedroom and thoroughly searched it at his request. They found no hex bags, no signs that would affect her, nothing that would indicate that there was anything supernatural about the way Meg had been feeling.

“But it’s not normal,” Gus insisted while Meg sat on the bed, cross-legged and rolling her eyes at their worry. “It’s really not something that just happens, Meg, you should see someone about that.”

“It’s nothing, okay? I’ve just been working double-shifts at the bar…”

“You’ve been working double-shifts since we know you,” Thomas argued.

“Well, maybe age is finally catching up to me, who knows?”

She knew, by the quizzical way they stared at her, that normal women in their thirties didn’t normally suffer from chronic fatigue and pain and complained about their age. Well, how was she supposed to know that? Back in her day, thirty was the age when most people started putting their affairs in order.

She didn’t sleep all that well that night. A pesky thought had started worming its way into her mind, and wouldn’t let her rest. Every time she closed her eyes, her mind went back to it and by the time the dawn broke, she was convinced she had analyzed it from every possible angle and it made entirely too much sense.

She fished her phone with the cracked screen, the one that only had Sam as a contact number, and did what she had promised herself that she wouldn’t do. She contacted him again.

He didn’t even sound angry to hear from her.

“Meg! It’s been a while! How are you doing, is everything fine?”

“I mean… not everything,” she admitted, and she proceeded to describe the symptoms she was suffering and how the guys at the bar thought it might have been supernatural in origin. “I can’t exactly tell them ‘Hey, I’m an ex-demon and this might have something to do with it’,” she concluded.

“Well…”

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Meg asked him, point blank. “That there’s something wrong with the… the cure. Is there a way the effects aren’t permanent? Should I start injecting myself with blessed human blood just to be sure…?”

“Meg. Meg, listen,” Sam interrupted her rambling. “I know you’re still in contact with the life and such, so of course your mind it’s going to go there, but you said it yourself, there’s no evidence what’s affecting you has anything to do with that.”

“Then what the hell could it be?”

“Have you asked a doctor?”

“Why would I do that?”

Sam sighed deeply on the other end of the line.

“I should have taken you to one the moment the cure was complete,” he commented. “To make sure everything was alright with you. Part of being human is… your body sometimes acts out or breaks down. And you have to have it checked out. I’m sorry.”

Meg didn’t know what to answer to that, so she didn’t.

“Are you still there?” Sam asked, after a few seconds.

“Yeah, I’m here.” She made another pause. “Guess I’ll have to get on with that, huh?”

“If you’re scared, I can drive to you and come along.”

“No. No, don’t do that,” Meg said, because she was sure that several of the guys in the bar would outright ask for Sam’s autograph if they found out who he was or try to rope him into a hunt with them or something. She made up another excuse though: “You have the missus and the kid to take care of. How are they, by the way?”

“They’re great, thank you! Dean made it into his little league team and…”

She spent the next fifteen minutes listening to the minutia of Sam’s life. It was strange to think that this had been the guy who had repeatedly carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Now he was all about the PTA meetings and… whatever else it was that parents did.

Then again, she was a demon letting her blood be extracted and sitting still on MRI scans to see why her legs sometimes wouldn’t do what she told them to, so she had no room to talk.

“We can treat the condition with drugs to slow down the deterioration process, but ultimately, there’s no known cure for it,” the doctor told her, with a solemn face that Meg suspected he practiced in the mirror for when he needed to give bad news like this. “You would benefit from physical therapy and I recommend you get a cane or crutches to help you get around. A wheelchair or a scooter could help too, in the long run. What did you say you did again?”

“I… I’m a waitress,” Meg said. “A bartender.”

The doctor looked at her with something akin to pity. Like the idea of someone her age still waiting tables and cleaning countertops was simply sad.

And it was sad. If she had known the body was going to have those issues…

Looking from the outside, her second human life did seem small and sad. She hadn’t done anything extraordinary with it, she hadn’t saved the world or discovered or invented anything that would advance this race that she was a part of again. She had only given some joy and support to the men and women who did all the dirty work of killing the monsters and rescuing the people. She had only helped an old man who grew more and more tired every day keep his business open. There was no grand gesture in her life that would make up in one fell swoop for all the evil she brought upon the world and Heaven seemed both closer now that her life expectancy had shortened, and further away than ever.

“Clarence, look, it’s been years,” she prayed to the angel later on, alone in her stark motel room once again. “I’ve been doing this for years. And now this thing is happening and… I really need you to show up. I’m scared and I don’t like it. I don’t like being scared of myself, of… can you just come see me? Just this once? I’m not asking you to cure me or whatever. Just… come here and tell me it’ll be okay. Tell me it’s all going to be worth it in the end.”

There was no fluttering of wings, no white light coming in through the window.

Meg got angry.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” she said, raising her voice as if that would make the angel listen to her more clearly. “I loved you. I did all of this just to see you again, and you can’t even be bothered to answer to one little prayer when crap is getting real? Go screw yourself.”

She stood up from the bed (hanging unto her night table as she did) and crossed the street to get to the bar again. Because maybe she couldn’t move with as much agility as before, but she could still stand behind the bar and serve beers and listen to tall tales that would distract her from her own misery.

She was taken aback when she entered and found at least a dozen regulars, people that were supposed to be in other states chasing monsters, hovering over one corner of the bar. They all looked up at her with sudden shock in their eyes.

“You’re not supposed to be here for another hour!” Leah, a young hunter with short hair, exclaimed when she saw her.

“What’s all this?” Meg asked, frowning at them. “What are you guys doing?”

They all looked around each other, as if feeling guilty somewhat. Peter was the first one to talk:

“Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but since you got here…”

They moved aside to reveal what they were hiding.

“We all pitched in,” Kyle commented, as Meg took some steps towards it. “Do you like it?”

The scooter was cherry red and someone had carved an anti-possession sigil on it. Meg put her hand on the handlebar, still not sure what to say.

“You… you got this for me?” she said. She had told Peter about her diagnosis three days before, how had they managed to find it in such a short time?

“A guy on the Internet,” Johnny explained when Meg asked that out loud. “Said he had no use for it anymore. He practically gave it away to me.”

“I know you said the doctor told you to use crutches first, but screw that,” Peter added. “This is gonna make it easier on you.”

“Guys.” Meg looked around, her throat closing up. “I… I don’t know what to say. You didn’t… you didn’t have to…”

“Well, you’re our favorite waitress.”

“Of course we had to!”

“Sit down and take it for a spin!”

It was disastrous. She crashed on two tables, but Peter didn’t seem mad about it at all. They drank and laughed and Meg pretended the tears that ran down her face were because of how happy she was.

Truth was, she was overwhelmed. Deep down in the pit of her stomach, she had this… fear. This feeling that as kind as everyone had been to her, she didn’t deserve it. She had done so little for them during those years…

“No, Meg, come on,” Thomas said as he poured another shot for her. “You’ve been with us through some shit. Remember when Frankie died? Remember what you told me?”

“Not really. We were kind of grief drinking and entirely wasted.”

Thomas opened his mouth, and then he closed it again.

“Well, it was something profound about him being a hero,” he explained in the end. “Some shit like that. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, you made me feel better.”

“You’re one of us,” Kyle said, patting her in the back. “And we take care of our own.”

She didn’t know what to do with that. She had never really considered she was one of “them”. Just that she was spending time with them until her years were up. Nothing more.

Humans were so strange.

Had she made that comment out loud? Was that why Peter was looking at her funny as they loaded up more beers to take back to the table?

“I told them it was your birthday,” he commented casually, touching his beard like he did when he was pensive. “But come to think of it, you never told me when was your birthday.”

Meg supposed she could have said the day she had been cured, but she hesitated and Peter noticed.

“Do you even have one of those?”

“Of course I have a birthday. I was born at some point,” Meg replied. And reborn as a demon, and then as a human again, but those were details he didn’t really need to know.

Peter looked at her quizzically with his kind grey eyes.

“Guess it’s not really that important,” he concluded. “I’m thinking we’re going to have to rearrange the tables so you can move around with that thing.”

Meg swallowed. She hadn’t even realized there was a lump in her throat.

“Thank you.”

“And with all you’re drinking, you might as well not come in tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t need you hungover, girl,” Peter replied, rolling his eyes. “Go enjoy the rest of your night.”

Meg wanted to thank him again, but she realized by that point, they were both getting too sentimental. A grumpy old man and an ex-demon didn’t do sentimental.

“I mean, you should have seen the guy that sold me this thing,” Johnny was saying when she came back to the table with more drinks. He was slurring his words and scratching at the stubble in his cheeks. He must have been in his mid-twenties and he had been hunting since a group of ghouls had eaten his whole family. “Stiff as a freaking board and dressed like he was Keanu Reeves in that crappy movie.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Gus told him.

“Yeah, what? He had like a black leather trench coat or some shit?”

“No, no, he _had_ a trench coat, but I’m talking about the other movie. The one with the angels and stuff.”

Before he could say any more, everybody booed him and asked him why the hell he watched horror movies to begin with, considering they lived through the damn things every other week. No one noticed Meg had gone quiet.

It was several hours later where she could ambush Johnny on the motel’s parking lot.

“Hey, this guy… what did he look like?”

“What?”

“The guy who sold you the scooter,” Meg asked, speaking slowly so Johnny’s alcohol-soaked brain would register her words. “What was he like?”

“Oh, like… movie star handsome,” Johnny told her. “Tall, built like a brickhouse. He had a suit under the trench coat, even though it was eighty freaking degrees. He didn’t break a sweat, though.”

“Did he tell you his name?” Meg asked, rolling in her scooter after Johnny’s stumbling steps. “Hey, Johnny.”

“What?”

“His name,” Meg insisted. “Did he tell you his name?”

“Oh, the guy. Let me think.” He stopped in front of his door and fumbled with his keys. It took ten painful minutes for him to get the key into the hole and Meg was half-tempted to rip it from his hands and open the door herself, but she waited patiently instead. “No, sorry, can’t recall. But hey, maybe you want to stay in with me tonight and it might come to me?”

There was an invitation in his smile and in the way he placed a hand on Meg’s shoulder. The swaying on his step didn’t inspire any confidence in her, though, and the description of the guy… well, it had set off her alarms. She wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the angel now.

“No, thanks. Won’t be fun. With all I’ve drunk, I’ll probably pass out midway through.”

“Your loss, babe,” Johnny said, with a shrug and stumbled face first into the bed, not even bothering to close the door behind him, so Meg had to do it for him.

The motel’s owner had an agreement of sorts with Peter, where the hunters that came to the bar could stay there and the guy didn’t ask too many questions. He had become Meg’s landlord and he hadn’t protested at all when she asked to be moved to a room on the first floor. She was going to miss the view from the window of her other room, but she did feel strangely relieved when she parked her scooter by the door and only had to take a few steps towards her bed. She felt exhausted and she was starting to think stairs were a horrible invention.

“Was it you?” she asked to the empty room. “Was that your weird way of telling me you’re still thinking of me?”

There was no answer, of course.

“Typical,” she mumbled.

She threw her clothes on the floor and wrapped herself in the sheets.

She didn’t remember her dreams. When she opened her eyes again, the room was lit with the glimmer of the sun seeping in through the window pane.

Except the sun was silver instead of gold. And it wasn’t coming from outside, from right behind her, along with a sweet, comfortable warmth. Meg sighed and just leaned into it. There was no pain, no worries in that glow. She was safe.

There were hands around her waist, now, pulling her close and something soft wrapped around her.

He kissed the top of her ear before mumbling:

“Of course I still think of you.”

“Well, you have a funny way of showing it,” Meg replied. “You could at least text a girl once in a while.”

She wasn’t scared and there wasn’t a doubt in her mind as to who it was that was holding her.

Castiel. Finally.

A part of her brain knew that it wasn’t real, but if felt so good. It was such a relief to hear his voice again, to feel his touch. She wanted to turn around and kiss him, pull him closer to her, but at the same time, she feared that if she did that, he would vanish in thin air like the early morning dream he was.

“I can’t do that,” her angel said, his fingers tangling softly in her hair. “I’m sorry, Meg.”

“Why not?” Meg asked. She didn’t want her frustration to rise up and interrupt this moment, not when she was feeling so peaceful, but she couldn’t help it.

He didn’t answer. He kept touching her though: his hand moved down her cheek, to her neck and her arm until she trembled. She reached out and touched the thing she was wrapped in and wasn’t surprised to feel the softness of feathers between her fingers. He sighed when she caressed his wings.

“Please, don’t do that,” he begged. “I… I can’t.”

“Right, you must have all those angelic businesses to get back to,” Meg replied, but she didn’t stop sliding her fingers, tracing the outline of his feathers. “But you could stay a while.”

The ghost touch of his lips on her skin made her shiver.

“I should…”

“No, don’t go.”

Meg turned around and slowly, she opened her eyes. She half expected to wake up when she did that, but no. She was still dreaming Castiel was there, lying in her bed with her, his body warm and embracing, his eyes darkening at the sight of her. She ran her hands through his hair, messing it up just a little more and smiled when his hands snaked up her back and pulled her closer.

“Stay. Just a little longer,” she begged.

He brushed aside a lock of her hair. His mouth was so close to her she could feel his breath tingling on her skin.

“Very well,” he whispered. “Just a little longer…”

There was a knock on the door.

Meg opened her eyes again and sat up, breathing harshly. She was cold again and her room was grey and empty.

Dammit.

Her heart was still beating and she still felt warm and safe, but the annoyance at someone dared to knock on her door at… okay, one in the afternoon. Fair enough.

But still. She had had the best dream for the first time in a very long time. She could mad that it had been interrupted before she even had the chance to properly kiss her angel.

“What?” she asked, wrapping the cover over her shoulders.

“Meg, come quickly!” the person at the other side (was it Gus?) said. “It’s Pete.”

“What about Pete?” Meg asked, but she was already grabbing her clothes from the floor.

There was a long pause on the other side of the door.

“He’s been attacked. He’s… he’s dead.”

All the warmth abandoned Meg’s body at once.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time Meg finished getting dressed and jumped on her scooter, the police and the paramedics were already there, along with Gus, Johnny and a couple of other hunters that had stayed the night at the motel since they didn’t have a job to go on to.

Meg parked the scooter outside just in time to see the door opening. Two paramedics pushed a gurney outside, covered in what looked like a huge plastic bag.

Pete’s thick wrist fell on the side, still wearing his favorite watch. It looked pale and blue underneath the fingernails.

He had been dead for hours, just laying there in the floor of his own bar. Meg’s guts churned at the thought.

“Meg?”

She startled and looked up. There was a dark-skinned man with a sheriff star on his coat looking at her. It took her a second to remember his name.

“Sheriff Jefferson.”

“I have some questions for you.”

“Woah, sheriff, wait up,” Johnny said, standing up. Of course, he and the other hunters were pulling their fake badges and IDs. “Meg was with us all night. We were celebrating…”

“She’s not a suspect,” Sheriff Jefferson clarified quickly. He seemed very tired. “I just want to clarify the timeline.”

“It’s fine, guys,” Meg promised the hunters. “It’s okay. Can I have some breakfast before?”

“There’ll be coffee at the station.”

She could barely stomach it, though. The image of Peter’s hand slipping from the gurney as they took him away kept replaying in her mind, over and over, even as she sat on the interrogating room.

Sheriff Jefferson and her were acquaintances. Hunters were rowdy and sometimes they ended up in his cells, only for Meg to come and post bail for them with Peter’s money. Sometimes there was trouble in the motel, so she would spot him dragging the culprit out in handcuffs. They would see each other around town, when she brought the groceries or the alcohol supply for the bar, and like all the neighbors in a small town, they would greet each other in passing.

She’d never had the pleasure of having a long one on one talk with him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to that now as he sat in front of her, wiping his bald head with a handkerchief.

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t even know where to start here,” he said. “I always knew there was something strange about that bar of yours.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You have all these ‘agents’ from all sorts of organizations coming and going from there,” Sheriff Jefferson explained. “The locals avoid it like the plague and the ones who have dared come inside, well, they say the people there tell all sort of strange stories. Peter didn’t cause trouble, he paid his taxes, he helped around. But there was always something weird about it.”

Meg didn’t answer, simply because it didn’t sound to her like there was a question in that little speech.

“Do you know anything about it? You’ve been working there, what, five years now?”

“Six,” Meg corrected him. She wrapped her hands around her cup of coffee. “No, I don’t know anything about it. I just work there.”

“Yet, all those guys were ready to jump at me to protect you…”

“I work there; they know me,” Meg insisted. “I loved Peter. I never would’ve hurt him.”

As the words left her mouth, she realized they were true. She had got used to that grumpy all man that was cheap about everything, that would listen to her ramble when she got drunk and never asked questions about her past, nor share anything about his with her. They were both lonely, withdrawn people. But they had kept each other company through those years with that tacit understanding that the present was everything that mattered.

And now he was gone.

“No, I know. And… forgive me, but… we don’t think you could have physically done it.”

“You mean because of this?” Meg pointed at her scooter.

“That,” Sheriff Jefferson admitted. “And because whoever did this… well, we’re probably looking for a very strong man, the way the body was, uh…”

“Sheriff, please, I know I look fragile but I’m no wilting flower.”

Whatever they had done to Peter, she had probably done worse to someone else.

Sheriff Jefferson still tried to avoid sharing many details.

“His throat was slashed, but before that someone broke his limbs, we think with a blunt object. He didn’t… he didn’t die fast.”

They had interrogated him, then. He had information of many of the active hunters in the state, and many in the neighboring areas, too. It could have been a demon, or a vampire… or any number of creepy old monsters with a vendetta, really. Meg was sure they had ended up killing him because Peter had refused to give up whoever it was his killer was looking for.

She drank her now cold coffee in one single gulp.

“We were up drinking until… two, maybe three in the morning,” she told Sheriff Jefferson. “Everybody left around that time.”

“What were you celebrating?”

“My birthday.”

Peter had given her a birthday. Because humans had those. And he knew. Even though he’d never said it, Meg knew he knew her humanity was not entirely like his. But he had never treated her differently for it.

Damn, she was going to miss the old bastard.

“I’m sorry.”

“He gave me the rest of the night free. He stayed back to lock up alone.”

“Nothing was stolen, as far as we can tell. All the money was still in the register.”

Of course. Peter knew about the hunters’ ways of making money through… less than legitimate ways, so he only took cash. And the person who killed him was after something much more valuable than just money.

She wasn’t lying when she said:

“I don’t know who could have done this.”

“Don’t worry. We will find out,” Sheriff Jefferson assured her.

Meg doubted it. But she was sure the hunters would figure it out.

Leah, Johnny and Gus had inspected every inch of the bar by the time she came back.

“The wards were broken. So was the Devil’s Trap under the floorboards,” Leah informed them when they gathered together in Meg’s room. “We found sulfur on the windows. Everything points to demons.”

“Why demons, though?” Gus asked, shaking his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. They’ve been gone for ages. Rumor has it you can’t even get one to make a deal these days.”

“Well, that’s where the evidence points us,” Johnny replied, lighting up a cigarette. He was the youngest of the three and he seemed… shaky, even though he was clearly trying to keep it together. “Man, there was so much blood. I keep thinking if we had stayed a little longer…”

“We would be dead too,” Meg concluded. “This wasn’t anyone’s fault, except for whoever killed Peter.”

“Right,” Gus agreed. “So… who do we know that has experience with fighting demons?”

“Well…” Leah said and pointed at Meg. She startled for a second before Leah added: “Didn’t you say you knew that guy… the Winchester guy?”

“Yes. But, uh… it’s not a good idea,” Meg said, quickly. “He’s retired. He’s probably dead, at this point, really. I guess I could try to get in touch with some other old contacts of mine.”

“Great.”

They all stared at her so Meg tried to play it off casually.

“Oh, I’m going to need time to do that. We should try to get Peter’s affairs in order, too,” she said. “Did he have any family…?”

“I think he had an ex-wife.”

Luckily, the prospect of funeral planning distracted them enough that they didn’t insist on Meg’s old contacts. She told them to come back the next day and made some calls.

Not to Sam, though. To some hunters’ stores that assured her they could deliver everything she needed to her later that same night when she insisted that it was an emergency. She slumbered for a couple of hours, but sadly, she didn’t have any more warm, happy dreams about angels. Not that it surprised her. She felt like warmth and happiness were things that had died along with Peter.

At two o’clock in the morning, after the ingredients had been delivered to her door, she grabbed her bag of weapons and headed out. She didn’t want to bring what she was going to do back to the place that had been her home for so long. The abandoned train tracks that ran behind the town were good enough for her, so she parked there, sat on the ground and opened the package.

She hadn’t held a summoning bowl in what it felt like ages and it was strange how its weight was so familiar in her hands. She could have also ordered a chicken or caught a cat, but human blood worked best. In a funny way, she supposed that this would be another test for the cure.

The tip of the angel blade sank easily in her skin. She bit her lips and ignored the pain as she moved it down, cutting as deep as she dared, letting the blood that looked black in the faint glimmer of her flashlight pool at the bottom of the bowl. The more blood, the better the connection would be, but when she started feeling a little lightheaded, she tied the towel around her arm and decided a shitty connection was better than passing out there where no one would find her.

Except, perhaps, the demon that had killed Peter.

She muttered the words in Latin, a spell that she had said thousandths of times before. The blood in the bowl bubbled, waiting for her to say a name.

She hesitated there. There was no way the Queen of Hell herself would take a call from her and she would cut her own tongue before talking to Crowley again. She didn’t know any of the new chums that populated Hell those days, so she really only had one option left.

“Ruby.”

The bowl became hot in her hands, so she had to put it down as her blood became thicker and darker.

The voice that answered her called sounded a lot less faint than she’d expected:

_… Meg?_

“I need to speak to you,” Meg said. “I have a situation here.”

_Don’t move. I’ll come to you._

In the blink of an eye, the demon was standing in front of her. Like Meg, she had recovered her old meatsuit when they had been brought back from the Empty, an attractive brunette with full lips and dark eyes. Unlike Meg, though, she remained unchanged.

She smiled as she approached Meg.

“Well, hello!” she said, smiling wide. “I thought you were… oh.”

Meg knew what she was seeing and hearing. There was no corrupting darkness under her skin. The heart in her chest was beating, her lungs were expanding with every breath she drew.

Under Ruby’s eyes, she seemed completely, helplessly, human.

“Well… would you look at that,” Ruby said, tilting her head. “I thought Crowley was lying, that the cure would kill you or…”

“No, it didn’t kill me,” Meg said, as if it wasn’t obvious. “Not for a lack of trying.”

She held on to her scooter and staggered up to her feet. They were the same height, but Meg had no illusions that, if it came to that, she would lose in a fight against her. Ruby looked her up and down, like taking in her new humanity with curiosity.

“I didn’t know you were topside,” Meg commented, still trying to sound casual and confident about this encounter.

Ruby hummed, noncommittally, as she walked around Meg, as if she was trying to analyze her from every possible angle.

“I’ve climbed some ranks since you left. Got a special dispense from the Queen,” Ruby explained, finally. “Came up to settle some scores.”

Meg didn’t like the sound of that.

“Scores with whom?”

Ruby didn’t answer as she came to stand in front of Meg again.

“I think you know.”

Well, of course. It didn’t take much of an imagination.

“You’re looking for Sam.”

“He’s a pretty hard man to find these days.”

“Didn’t Rowena forbid everyone from coming anywhere close to him?”

“No, she forbade us from hurting him.” Ruby reminded her. “I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to talk, for old time’s sake. I think I’m owed some closure after the way we broke up.”

“Don’t you mean after the way he held you down while his brother gutted you?”

“Tomato, tomato…” Ruby shrugged. “But hey, I was in the neighborhood when I heard your call. What are the odds?”

Yes. What _were_ the odds?

“What do you say we go for some drinks, have ourselves a little girl’s night out and you tell me all about how this cure thing worked…?”

“Did you kill Peter?” Meg asked, point blank.

“Who?” Ruby frowned and then she realized: “Oh. The old man at the hunters’ bar. Yeah, I might have got a little carried away with the knife, but then again, it was really his fault. He wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear. Kept insisting he didn’t know where Sam was, even though every hunter I have interrogated before told me this was the last place they heard his name mentioned.”

Because Meg had mentioned it. Because everybody knew she had known him, because she had used his name as a password to get accepted into this world. She had been the one who put Ruby on the trail, and Peter had died as a consequence.

The ice block that had formed in her stomach since finding out about it started melting, but she needed it still. She leaned into the coldness and try not to show any emotion when Ruby asked:

“What’s it to you, anyway?”

“He was my boss.”

“No! You work at that dumpster?” Ruby let out a long laugh, like that was the funniest thing she had heard in her entire life. “Woah, guess things have changed, haven’t they?”

Meg glared at her and Ruby just smirked.

“Hey, I’m guessing the Sam contact that was in that bar was you, huh? Weren’t you two close?”

Meg was tempted to say something like “Not as close as the two of you”, but she didn’t. She was tired and she had lost a lot of blood.

And suddenly, she was also furious with Ruby. She had no right to do that. This was her life. Peter was her friend. Why did Ruby think she could just saunter in and destroy something that didn’t belong to her?

Ruby was still chuckling.

“Hey, listen, sorry about the old man. But if you have any intel about Sam, I would greatly appreciate it if you…”

“No.”

“Fair enough. Maybe I should have just asked you nicely to begin with.” Ruby took a step closer to Meg. “But I’m asking nicely now.”

“And if I don’t want to tell you?”

Ruby lifted her eyes as they turned black.

“Then I guess I won’t ask so nicely.”

“And here I thought we were friends.”

“We are!” Ruby assured her. “But you’re… you’ve changed, Meg. I don’t mean just because of the cure. Your obsession with that angel, it made you _weak._ And then you go and get attached to a bunch of humans? Of _hunters_?” She scoffed. “The old Meg never would have.”

Meg was tempted to ask if _she_ was obsessed with Castiel, what was Ruby’s deal with Sam? But she already suspected Ruby was lying about “just wanting to talk” to him. She might have fooled Rowena, but Meg knew her better.

She thought of the kid. His little smile with the missing tooth and the way he had asked her if she’d known his Uncle Dean. And she knew there was no way she was letting Ruby get anywhere near them.

“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted.

“See?” Ruby got even closer. “Now, just tell me where was the last place you saw Sam and I can take it from…”

She screamed out when the holy water hit her. Meg lunged herself at Ruby and tackled her to the ground. She poured the rest of it right over her mouth and throat to quiet down her, ignoring the way Ruby’s skin sizzled and smoked, ignoring the way she squirmed and buckled under her body. She had the advantage for now, but it would take just one slip, from her, from her body, for Ruby to overpower her.

She took out the angel blade from inside her boot and sank it straight through Ruby’s shoulder, pinning her to the ground. Ruby let out a gasp of pain and stared at Meg with horror.

“The old Meg would’ve just killed you,” Meg pointed out, calmly. “But I don’t want to deal with Rowena if I do that. I don’t want to deal with _any_ of you, ever again. This is your first and only warning, Ruby. If you get anywhere close to me or my people again, the blade is going through your heart. Do you understand me?”

Ruby coughed out. The burning in her lips and her face was already healing, but Meg had another vial of holy water hidden in her jacket if she tried anything.

It wasn’t necessary. After a few seconds, Ruby struggled to get a word out:

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m glad we understood each other. I’m going to pull this out now, and you’re going to be gone, and never come back here.”

She did, and held unto the scooter to get to her feet. Ruby stayed on the ground a few seconds more. When she stood up, she had a hand against her shoulder wound and she seemed furious. Meg held tightly to the blade, ready to use it if Ruby attacked her again, but after a few seconds, the demon stepped back.

“Nice catching up with you, bestie,” she spat out.

And then she was gone.

Meg breathed out in relief. Her forearm was bleeding again and the towel she had wrapped around it was soaked. Her back ached from the effort she had made and all her limbs felt like lead.

But Ruby was gone and with any luck, she would spread the word that the bar was off limits for any other demon who wanted to try something funny.

The way back to the motel was a lot slower, perhaps because she was dizzy and had to halt several times to wait for the world to stop spinning around her. By the time she was back in her room, her forearm had stopped bleeding, but the wound was still tender and she knew it would open again if she made any sudden movements. She spent a good hour disinfecting it and trying to stitch it shut with trembling fingers. She needed some food and rest, she knew, but she couldn’t get them just yet.

The phone with the cracked screen was hidden in the depths of her nightstand. She plugged it in to charge and waited about three seconds before turning it on and calling the only contact she had kept in it.

“Come on, Sam,” she mumbled. “Come on…”

“ _We’re sorry. The number you just dialed has been disconnected…_ ”

Meg put the phone down and stared at it, as if it had betrayed her.

Then she grabbed her regular phone and called Gus.

“What? It’s six in the morning,” he complained.

“I don’t care. Get here. Bring Johnny and Leah. It’s important.”

It took them twenty more minutes to arrive. By that time, Meg had eaten pretty much everything in her mini-fridge and was well into her second cup of coffee.

Leah’s eyes detected the bandage on her forearm immediately.

“What happened to you?”

“It’s not important. I need you to go to Kansas.”

The three hunters stared at her like she had just asked them to go to the moon.

“Okay, why?” Gus asked.

“You have to warn a friend of mine that his crazy ex-girlfriend might be stalking him.”

“That doesn’t really answer the question…”

“Does this have anything to do with Peter?” Johnny asked. “Do you know who killed him?”

“That’s handled,” Meg promised them. “But this friend of mine might be in danger and someone needs to let him know.”

They exchanged looks and Meg was sure they were going to tell her she had lost her mind.

“This… friend,” Leah said, finally, speaking very slowly. “Is he…?”

“The less you know about it, the better.”

“Okay, but why can’t you come with us?”

“Because me leaving would be suspicious,” Meg pointed out. “Three hunters going out on just another job isn’t going to call anyone’s attention. Besides, I have to stay here to handle Peter’s things.”

They were still hesitant and Meg had to repress the impulse to scream at them.

“Guys, I promise if you do this for me, I am never asking for anything. Ever again.”

That seemed to get through to them just how important this really was for her.

“Give us the address and we’ll give the message,” Leah said.

Meg drilled it into them how important it was that they left soon and went there fast.

“If you need to pee, use a damn bottle,” she told them. “And load up on holy water.”

“Are there going to be demons involved?”

“Hopefully not.”

“How would we know we have the right guy if you won’t even tell us his name?”

“He’s tall. You’ll know him when you see him.”

She stayed back in the parking lot until Johnny’s old Camaro disappeared in the distance. She spent the rest of the day carving warding symbols in hers and everybody’s doors. The motel owner come out of one of the rooms at one point, saw her with a knife in her hand, and promptly turned around and left without asking any more questions.

The exhaustion eventually caught up with her. She woke when the sun was going down, to a call from Leah.

“We found a guy in the address you gave us, but he was average height,” she informed Meg. “He told us he’s just rented the place, after a family moved out six months ago. They didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

Meg let out a sigh of relief.

“Do you want us to keep digging for your friend?”

“No,” she said. “No, that’s fine. Just… come back here so we can start planning Pete’s funeral.”

She didn’t know where Sam was, but if she didn’t, that meant neither did Ruby or anyone else. That was fine. That was important. Maybe his wife was still hunting, but Meg had to trust she was smart enough to make sure nothing would follow her home.

They had to wait another week before the bar was declared not an active crime scene anymore and they finally released Peter’s body to them. Ida, his ex-wife, showed up and watched with disapproval as the hunters that had gathered wrapped him in a shroud and placed him on top of the pyre.

“He bought the bar because of me, you know,” she commented to Meg. “Said it was his wife to get out of the life, which I asked him over and over to do. But there were still hunters coming and going at all hours from there, so in the end I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“So… the bar is yours now?” Meg asked. She had been so busy with the police and Ruby and Sam that she hadn’t even stopped to wonder what would become of the place she had called home for so long.

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see the testament.”

“Pete left a testament?” Johnny asked, as he came back to look for more logs.

“He always left a testament before he went out on a hunt,” Ida replied. She sounded bitter.

Meg’s thoughts once again flew towards Sam and Eileen. Would Sam grow this bitter? Would the past catch up with him?

Thomas lit on the match.

“Anyone want to say any words?” he asked. “Meg?”

Meg was suddenly acutely aware that everybody was looking at her. She wished the earth would open up and swallow her, scooter and all, but she still managed to get words out:

“We’ll see you soon enough, you old bastard.”

She didn’t know if that was the right thing to say, but the host of hunters that was gathered around seemed to like them well enough. Thomas threw the match and they stood around, watching the smoke rise in the air.

Ida found the testament in Pete’s apartment later that afternoon.

“Well, apparently he’s updated it since the last time we saw each other,” she told Meg on the phone. “He left everything to you.”

“What?”

“He left me some money, too, but yeah, the bar and this place are yours.”

“Oh.”

For the first time since Gus had knocked on her door to tell her that Peter was dead, Meg didn’t feel the block of ice in her stomach. It didn’t melt, exactly. It shattered.

“Hey. No. Look… he just… I’m sure he cared for you like a daughter. He was just never good at expressing his feelings… please, don’t cry.”

Meg tried to. It still took her a very long time to pull herself together.

* * *

She changed the name of the bar to Peter’s Shack and kept it largely the same. Of course, she put up the wards that Ruby had broken again and added some of her own.

“I’ve never seen this spell before,” Kyle commented as he etched them into the wood. “What language is this?”

“Ancient Babylonian. Now, be careful, we need that to be exact, you hear me?”

He looked like he wanted to know where the hell she’d learned to speak ancient Babylonian, but in the end, he just shrugged. It was one of those things hunters picked up in the life.

She found a way to arrange the tables so that there would be easier to navigate with her scooter. She spent most of her time behind the bar with her crutches, though, but it was nice to move around and park next to the regulars’ tables to listen to how the last hunt had gone and what weird cases they were looking into next.

She was listening in for news, of course. She didn’t mention Sam’s name again and no one brought him up. There were no rumors about angels, no demonic omens anywhere near her.

“Nope, still nothing. No deals. No possessions. It seems like demons have disappeared and honestly, good riddance to them.”

For the most part, it seemed like Rowena was still keeping Hell shut tight and Ruby had listened to her and was staying away.

That was good. She still asked a priest (a friend of Father Olmos who knew that demons weren’t just metaphorical) to bless the water tank so she could always have a vodka bottle filled with holy water under the counter. She never stopped carrying the angel blade inside her boot.

She sold Peter’s apartment. She had no use for it, since the building it was in didn’t have an elevator and just the thought of climbing two sets of stairs with her crutches made her cringe. But since she now had stuff like, actual furniture and money, she couldn’t keep living in the motel across the street.

The owner barely groaned when she told him she was moving out after almost seven years of dwelling there. Unlike Peter, he’d warmed up to her, so she wasn’t sorry to finally leave that place.

“It looks like a dumpster,” Thomas said when he and a handful of others stood in the front yard of her new home.

“Well, the real state agent called it a ‘fixer-upper’,” Meg replied, with a shrug. “First thing I need to do is get rid of those stairs in the porch and put a damn ramp on it.”

It was ‘cozy’, which was another way of saying small (one story, one bedroom), but she’d got it cheap and she could basically do whatever she wanted with it. So that was exactly what she did. She lowered the cabinets so they would be easy to reach, she got rid of the carpet and installed a bathtub in the bathroom. Most of the money Peter had left her was invested in the house, but after a few months, Meg could say she had a home she was comfortable in.

That was a weird thing to think about. She had a home.

Hell had hardly been one, even when she was Azazel’s right-hand woman. The place reeked, she had to be watching her back all the time, and she couldn’t really say she missed it when Crowley took over and she found herself exiled from it. No, her fighting Crowley had been about pride, not about Hell or what it meant to her.

Earth was a little better, accommodations-wise, but still. When she was topside, she was always moving: from body to body, from place to place, following whatever orders she was carrying from Azazel or Lucifer and, later, wherever her whim took her. She had picked up some habits, like music and movies, but for the most part, she could never really stay in one place long enough to actually enjoy it. And well, when she turned human, the motel could’ve hardly been called a home. If someone had asked her where she lived, she would have said the bar.

She didn’t know if she would’ve liked Heaven when she was a demon. If it was eternal bliss and all that jazz, would she have grown bored with it? She didn’t know. She didn’t have that restlessness anymore and, as she approached forty (give or take a few millennium), Heaven looked more and more like an evening spent in her bathtub, reading a trashy romance novel and popping chocolates into her mouth.

She still prayed to Castiel when she was alone. She didn’t expect an answer anymore, not even a weird dream of him embracing her, but she had kept the habit for so many years that it was hard to shake off now. She told him about the house renovations, about how things were at the bar, she cried out to him when Johnny got killed by a werewolf a few years later.

“Is there really a Heaven?” she asked him, sitting alone in the back with a bottle of vodka, after they’d burned his body and she had closed shop. “Did I dream all of that, Clarence? Sometimes it felt like everything before was a hallucination, and this my real life. Did I dream you up? Sam, Dean, everything?”

Castiel didn’t show up to answer one way or another. Meg wiped away her tears with a paper napkin.

“Well, if there is a Heaven, I hope at least the kid got into it,” she commented. “He deserved it. Peter, too. And Frankie. I… even hope Dean got there. The guy was an ass, but at least for Sam’s sake, you know?”

She took another swig of the vodka.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone and got myself killed heroically the day after I was cured, to just be done with it,” she commented, with a bitter laugh. “Now, I’ve got to live, I’ve got to lose… I don’t know about love. I love my guys, I guess, but you… I never loved anything or anyone like you. And you didn’t even care. That’s sad. And embarrassing, if all of this turned out to be for nothing.”

She stared at the bottle for a few seconds before setting it down.

“But you know what? Even if it did, even if you never gave a crap about me in the end, I don’t think I would’ve done anything different. When I was a demon, I couldn’t understand there were other ways to love, others ways to be happy. You got the ball rolling on me being less of a crappy influence in this world, but I took it and run with it to the finish line. Does that make sense? I don’t understand sport metaphors. What I mean, I think I should get a little credit for wanting this. For wanting… redemption, or whatever you want to call this.”

The kitchen remained depressingly empty and she was almost out of vodka. Meg raised it above her head.

“To Johnny. Wherever that kid might be.”

And she drank the rest of it in one gulp.


	4. Chapter 4

Peter’s Shack had turned into quite a popular spot for hunters passing through Wyoming. Everyone knew if you wanted info, or community, or just a good drink, they should come over and Meg would do her best to make sure they left happy and drunk and with whatever else they needed. The number of regulars and familiar faces grew. On any given night, there could be up to a two dozen hunters boasting about their kills or drinking their sorrows away or talking about the secret bunker full of secret lore and artifacts to fight the supernatural.

“Come on now.”

“No, I’m serious, they say it’s somewhere in Kansas!”

“Next thing you’re going to tell is that the Winchester brothers are real, and that they saved the world like a dozen times or whatever!”

“They are real. Meg knew them, didn’t you, Meg?”

“I knew _a_ guy who _said_ he was Sam Winchester,” Meg replied, as she filled up their shot glasses. She had gotten used to move with such grace with her crutch behind the countertop, that she was like a fish in the water by then. “Who knows, really.”

“Thomas said you have an angel blade. Did you ever see an angel?”

“Oh, yeah. His name was Clarence and he came to me on a Christmas Eve just like this to tell me my life was worth living.”

That got her a round of laughter from the crowd and the young hunter who had asked the question (Nadia, she’d said was called) blushed. Meg patted her in the shoulder.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, kid,” she said, before moving on to the other side of the bar, where a woman with black hair was sitting, separated from the rest of the crowd. “What can I get you?”

The woman didn’t look at her. She kept watching the small Christmas tree that Meg had installed on a corner, as if the changing lights were fascinating to her.

“Hey,” Meg repeated. “What can I get you?”

The woman still didn’t raise her head until Meg reached out and touched her forearm. At which point she gave a little jump and short laugh.

“Sorry,” she said, pronouncing her words with a strange cadence. “A beer and peanuts, please.”

A deaf hunter, sitting right there in her bar. There were small crinkles around her eyes and some grey hairs between all the black, but she had sweet brown eyes and a kind smile. Meg had no problem recognizing her, even though she had only seen her once, from a distance, over a decade ago.

She made sure not to react at all. The Winchester brothers were a favorite fairy tale around the bar, but she didn’t think anyone needed to know the wife of one them was sitting right there. She hopped back and placed the beer next to Eileen.

“Thank you. Sorry.”

“No worries,” Meg said. She grabbed a glass and leaned on the countertop, cleaning it just to keep her hands occupied and leaned a little closer, so it would be easier for Eileen to read her lips. “Long day?”

“Yes. Shapeshifter a couple towns over.”

“Those are always tricky. And the bastards never take a break, even on Christmas, huh?”

“Tell me about it.” Eileen laughed. “I have to leave early tomorrow. I told my husband I would be home in time for Christmas dinner.”

“I’m sure the kids will be glad to see you and tell you all about what Santa brought them.”

“We only have the one and he’s too old for Santa. Still.” Eileen took a swig of her beer and settled it back down. There was a pensive expression in her eyes. “I’m thinking of hanging it up. I’m getting too old for this. This last job…”

She shook her head and Meg saw the look on her eyes that she had learned to recognize. It was the look of a warrior that was tired of all the blood and the fighting. She had seen it many times. She knew it was that point where hunters became sloppy, and a sloppy hunter was a dead hunter.

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Meg said.

“Yeah.” Eileen took another drink. “How did it work out for you?”

Meg frowned at her.

“You’re a retired hunter, aren’t you? That’s what they told me about you.”

“Oh, yeah.” Meg shrugged. “I’m a retired everything.”

The joke fell flat. She really missed when she could make those weird comments around Peter and he would just _get it_. It had been… what, seven years now since Ruby had killed him?

Grief was one of those weird human emotions that no one had ever taught her how to handle. It always hit her when she was least expecting it.

“It’s been working great,” Meg said. “You know, as best as it can. I don’t have husband or a kid, though, so I don’t know how it’d work out for you.”

“You never got married?”

“I never stopped pining for the one who got away,” Meg said, with a laugh. “But you know… I count these assholes as family.”

She made a sweeping gesture around the bar. Leah was in the corner with her girlfriend sitting in her lap, laughing along with Gus. Thomas and Kyle were having a heated argument about who was hustling who by the pool table. The new kids had restarted their earlier discussion about secret bunkers and deals with demons, things that none of them would have to ever witness, with any luck.

“I wish I didn’t have to put so many of them in a pyre so often,” Meg added. “So perhaps it’s a good thing that you hang it up when you get home tomorrow night.”

“Hey, Meg! Can we get more whiskey, here?”

“Coming up!” Meg turned to Eileen and smiled at her. “Great chat.”

“Yeah. It was nice meeting you.”

The three kids were laughing out loud when Meg got close to them and poured more whiskey on their glass shots.

“You’ve been downing those like it’s water,” she told them, shaking her head. “Might want to slow there?”

“Ah, come on!” the guy with sandy blonde hair said. (Davey, she thought). “It’s Christmas Eve!”

“Yeah, and we’ve been working our butts off,” the second guy, a brunette, added (Tyson, if she was correct). “What, with all the blood and the…”

Nadia kicked his stool. Meg stopped for a second to look at them, but they were all laughing and changing the subject again. It was weird. The three of them had been coming to the bar for some months now, and they usually stayed up late and drank like only people in their twenties could, but they had never been this loud before.

She chalked it up to Christmas spirit.

Leah and her girlfriend got up from the booth and waved at Meg as they headed for the door. Thomas groaned and slapped roll of bills on Kyle’s hand. They both headed for the door and grabbed their coats.

“Merry Christmas!”

“See you tomorrow,” Meg replied, waving at them.

The only people left now were Eileen, still nursing her beer and the kids, who were talking amongst themselves a little quieter now. Meg looked at the clock above the bar. It was one in the morning, which meant it was technically Christmas already.

Eileen also looked at the clock.

“I should be going.” She drank up the rest of her beer and stood up. “Got to get up early tomorrow.”

“Good luck,” Meg said. She was tempted to add something like ‘Send Sam my regards’, but that would have prompted a very long explanation as to how she knew Sam and how she knew who Eileen was and frankly, she wasn’t up for dealing with it.

She started picking up the abandoned bottles and empty plates over the countertop to clean them. She would give one last round with her scooter over the tables and pick everything up, shove it on the dishwasher and then ride home, get into bed. Maybe she would say a little prayer to Cas before going to sleep.

A day like any other, a night like any other. The only indication it was Christmas was the tree still glowing in the corner.

Eileen headed for the door, but then Davey was standing in her way, stopping her from going any further. He was taller and wider than her, and he was getting right up in her face.

“Hey, lady, what’s the rush?”

Eileen tried to move around him, but Davey stepped to the side to forbid it.

“What…?” Eileen began asking, but then Davey grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her.

“Hey!” Meg protested. She moved as fast as she could with her crutch, but of course, she wasn’t fast enough. In a second, Nadia was standing in front of her, a large hunting knife in her hand pointing directly at her throat.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Meg’s blood ran cold.

Davey grabbed Eileen and sat her down on one of the chairs while Taylor stood up with a Swiss army knife in hand and headed for the door.

“Okay!” Meg said, maneuvering to move back. “What the hell is this? What are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Nadia asked, a cruel laughter that sounded nothing like hers coming out of her throat, her eyes turning black as she spoke. Tylor sank the tip of the knife on the doorway, where the symbols that prevented demons from coming in were, and started carving.

Possessed. How was it possible? The first thing any hunter worth their salt did was get anti-possession tattoo. That didn’t prevent it from being burned or taken away.

“How did you get in here?” Meg asked.

“Oh, we figured it out.” Nadia, or the thing wearing Nadia’s face, shrugged.

“A little shot of blessed blood to the veins,” Davey said, his hands still on Eileen’s shoulder to keep her in the seat. “It’s kind of like microdosing. You do it enough, eventually those symbols don’t do anything to you anymore.”

“Smart,” Meg said. She wasn’t going to add that bragging about it wasn’t as smart. If they were weak enough to walk in the bar despite the warding, maybe…

“No, no, no. Don’t make any sudden movements,” the demon in Nadia’s body said, raising the knife so Meg would see it. “This one likes you. She would hate for you to get hurt.”

“If you’re not after me, then what…?”

Tyler finished desecrating the wards and stood back. The door swung open and Ruby strutted inside.

“Hello, Meg,” she greeted her.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Meg groaned, understanding all at once.

“You know her?” Eileen asked. Her voice didn’t change at all. If she was scared or confused, she wasn’t letting it show in her face or her voice.

“We’re old friends,” Ruby said, grinning as she leaned in front of Eileen so she could read her lips. “Just like your husband and me.”

Eileen tilted her chin up.

“You’re Ruby.”

“So, he’s told you about me!” Ruby said, laughing with delight. “Good. That makes things easier.”

“What’s the big idea? You’re gonna kill her because she’s Sam’s wife?” Meg asked, rolling her eyes. She swayed ever so slightly, but Nadia didn’t notice. “I gotta say, this psycho ex-girlfriend schtick you’ve got going? Not cute. You used to be subtler.”

“Well, then you’ll be excited to know I plan on becoming psycho wife! I get inside of her. I go home. I make him happy like she never could in all these years.” She leaned closer to Eileen. “And then I snatch it all away by strangling him with their brat’s intestines.”

Eileen buckled in the chair, but Davey kept her sat down.

“You’re not gonna touch them!”

“I’m gonna do a lot more than touching them,” Ruby replied. She grabbed Eileen’s shirt and unbuttoned it to reveal the anti-possession tattoo right underneath her collarbone. “And I’m gonna make sure you’re awake for every bit of it.”

Meg moved a little closer to the counter. Nadia wasn’t paying attention at all, instead listening to Ruby and smiling like her stupid villain monologue was the most inspiring thing she had ever heard.

“Get me something to burn off this thing,” Ruby instructed Tyler.

He jumped over the bar and headed for the kitchen as Ruby turned her attention to Meg.

“Of course, for that plan to work, I’m gonna have to kill you so you can’t warn him. You understand. It’s nothing personal.”

“You’re a real bitch, you know that?” Meg spat out.

Ruby scoffed and if Meg knew her any less, she could’ve sworn she was offended.

“You of all people should get why I’m doing this.”

“Sure. And why is that again?”

“Love,” Ruby said. “No one can love like we do. We’d do anything for it. I mean, look at you! This miserable life you’ve chosen: growing old, growing sick and all for what? For an angel that didn’t even care?”

“Shut up,” Meg warned her through gritted teeth.

“Hey, at least I have enough self-respect to admit when I’ve been dumped and do something about it.”

“So this is more revenge than love, then?”

Ruby shrugged.

Tylor returned from the kitchen, brandishing a lighter and a pair of kitchen tongs Meg didn’t even remember having. She was going to really need to clean up back there one of these days.

Who was she kidding? The chances of getting out alive of this one were slim, at best.

But she took one look at Eileen’s furious face and decided that she needed to get out of there. Meg owed that much to Sam. Her fingers closed around the neck of the bottle. Nadia still wasn’t paying as much attention to her as she should have.

“Rowena’s not going to be happy when she finds out what you’re doing,” Meg warned Ruby.

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her,” Ruby replied, with a shrug. She turned around and grabbed the tongs from Tyler’s hands. “And besides, I’m thinking maybe a change of regime is in order. Hey, if you promise to be really quiet about this, maybe I can take you to Hell with me, turn you into a demon again. We can take on the Queen Mother together. What do you say?”

“I would tell you to go to Hell, but I get the impression you’d enjoy that.”

Ruby clicked her tongue, clearly disappointed.

“Your loss.”

She turned on the lighter and held it to the tongs until they were hot red. She smiled and moved to be in front of Eileen.

“Now this is going to hurt you much more than it’ll hurt me.”

She pressed the tongs against her skin and Eileen cried out.

Demons couldn’t resist watching someone squirming in pain, even ones that had been microdosing with blessed blood. Nadia turned her head around…

Meg raised the bottle and hit her in the back of the head as hard as she could. The glass shattered against her skull. The holy water spilled down her head and shoulders, and the demon screamed out, but held on to her host. Meg raised one of her crutches over the countertop and slammed it back down on her shoulder. She barely had time to hear the familiar crack of broken bones before her balance, as it was wont to do, betrayed her.

She fell on the wooden floor. Sounds of fight and broken wood came from above her head and she figured that Eileen was fighting tooth and nail, but she wasn’t going to last long against four demons.

Meg dragged herself towards the end of the bar, where her scooter was parked, and grabbed unto the handle to hoist herself up on it.

Nadia ran up to her, growling furiously, so Meg started the scooter and headed directly towards her.

She’d always wanted to know if the little ward carved in the cherry red paint actually had any effect on demons, and by the way Nadia scream and hit the floor when the scooter hit her, it did. Meg didn’t wait for her to get up before she turned around to go to the other demons.

Eileen had, impressively, managed to escape from Davey’s grasp. Sam’s demon killing knife glistened on her hand, as Ruby walked around her, with the calculated movements of a lioness about to jump on her prey.

Tyler and Davey were on the floor. Davey had his back against the wall, while Tyler kept his hands somewhere on his shoulder.

“Ruby, he’s bleeding really badly!”

“Shut up!” Ruby ordered them. She lunged herself at Eileen. The slash in the air failed to reach the demon and they both crashed against a table, breaking them under their weight.

Meg caught a glimpse of the lighter discarded on the floor. And in a second, she knew what she had to do.

Before she could move, Nadia grabbed unto her hair and pulled back. Meg felt the cold of the steel sliding between her ribs, but she ignored the pain. She jerked her head back, the top of it hitting Nadia in the chin hard enough that she let go and Meg could speed up her scooter, leaning over to grab the lighter as she passed it by.

She hadn’t called the priest to re-bless the water tank in maybe three months, but maybe, by some miracle, it was still okay. It had to be.

It had to be, dammit.

The flame flickered and Meg threw it against the bottles above the counter. The hit was hard enough that some of them got knocked on the floor and shattered with a din. Eileen and Ruby rolled on the floor and Nadia was starting to get back up. Meg leaned over and got the blade out of her boot. She didn’t want to hurt these kids, but the demons riding their bodies weren’t giving them too much choice.

Nadia looked at her… but then Davey let out a moan of pain and her attention moved towards him.

“Ruby!” she called out as she ran towards him.

Ruby pushed Eileen away against the wall, and stepped backwards to look at his lackeys.

“Are you serious right now?!”

“Problem with blessed human blood, Ruby,” Meg warned her. “It makes demons _care_.”

There was a sparkle followed by a mild explosion. The roaring fire behind the counter had reached the Christmas tree, and the lights were short-circuiting. A grey, thick smoke rose from the branches and the fire alarm started blaring over their heads.

All at once, the sprinklers turned on and rained water on them.

It was a Christmas miracle. The demons’ skins started sizzling almost immediately as they let out screams of agony. Ruby covered her head with her arms and moved backwards, but the others looked at each other with eyes wide open and expressions of pain.

“Screw this!” Davey said and opened his mouth. The demon inside him smoked out fast, leaving the stench of sulfur behind him. Nadia and Tyler immediately did the same thing, and the bodies of the three young hunters fell limp on the floor.

“Cowards!” Ruby screamed out, but even the way her skin was reddening and peeling off wasn’t going to stop her. She turned her attention towards Eileen once again, and the hunter raised her knife…

Meg’s scooter was faster. In a second, she was behind Ruby, standing up so the tip of the blade would go straight through her heart. Ruby let out a dying gasp as her skin flashed golden.

“I warned you, _bestie_ ,” Meg muttered. “Enjoy the Empty.”

Ruby collapsed on the floor.

And a second later, so did Meg.

Her legs were usually unreliable when it came to her staying up, but this time she couldn’t blame them. Her vision was growing dark and the searing pain she had been ignoring all the time was starting to creep back in. When she touched her side, she found it sticky and her fingers came back soaked in red.

Well… damn.

“Meg?” someone was calling out. “Meg!”

“Call an ambulance!”

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry…”

It reminded her a little of that time when she had fallen and split her forehead open against the counter, how all the hunters flurried around her asking her if she was alright, how someone had pressed a handkerchief against the cut. Except she didn’t think a handkerchief would do this time.

Eileen was next to her, holding her head.

“Are you…?” Meg asked her, but she couldn’t go on. The pain was growing stronger, invading every one of her senses. What the hell had that stupid demon cut?

“You saved me,” Eileen said. “You…”

“I had to,” Meg said, and she tried to smile, but she was sure what she managed was barely a grimace. “Sam never would have forgiven me. How is he, by the way? How’s the kid?”

Eileen’s eyes moved to Meg’s wound. She was barely aware that someone was pressing something against it, as if that would stop the cascade of blood coming out of it. Or remedy all the blood she had already lost.

Was all the red on the floor hers? Or had the water from the sprinklers made it seem more abundant than it was?

Oh, well. She guessed it didn’t really matter.

Eileen sounded like she could barely speak. Her eyes were humid with unshed tears.

“He’s… they’re both fine. Dean is… he’s graduating high school next spring.”

“Really? Time flies, huh?” Meg tried to laugh, but her ribs hurt too much. “Good thing you’re not gonna miss that out.”

“The ambulance is coming!” Tylor informed them.

“Meg, hold on,” Nadia said, her voice breaking. “Hold on, please…”

“Kid. Kid, look at me,” Meg muttered, grabbing unto her shoulder. “This wasn’t your fault, okay? You didn’t do this. It wasn’t your fault.”

Unlike Eileen, Nadia was not holding back the tears.

“Say it,” Meg demanded.

“It wasn’t… it wasn’t my fault.”

“Keep saying it until you believe it.”

Though she knew by experience it wasn’t going to be that easy. She still believed Peter was her fault. She should have killed Ruby when she had the chance. Well, better late than never.

Her vision was fading. Eileen was holding on to her wrist, probably counting her heartbeats, and Meg knew exactly what she was hearing. How weak it was. The long pauses between one and the next. There was simply not enough blood left in her for it to keep pumping. She wanted to say something else, but even her lungs were aching.

And she was hallucinating. She saw the silhouette of a man standing behind Davey, who had leaned against a chair holding a rag against his bleeding shoulder. She was cold, maybe that was because the bar’s door was open and there were flakes of snow blowing inside. The lights flashed outside, blue and red, blue and red, blue…

The man was kneeling right beside her now and it wasn’t a man at all.

All at once, the pain was gone. The one from her wound and the one she had carried around for so many years in her back, in her legs. For the first time since she had been cured and tied to that body, she was light as air.

Light as a spirit.

“Meg Masters? Is that correct?” the short bald man asked, looking at the clipboard he held in his hand. “My name is Ishmael and I’m your Reaper.”

“Yeah. I figured as much,” Meg said.

The paramedics were all over her bar, trying not to slip on the wet floor. One of them was looking for pulse in the neck of the body she had inhabited for so long and shaking their heads as others tended to Davey. Nadia cried with her face buried on Eileen’s chest, while Tylor leaned against the counter, looking shocked and confused, as if he couldn’t process what had just happened.

But Meg couldn’t touch them anymore. She wished she could have told Eileen to give her regards to Sam, but well, it was too late now.

She turned her back on them and followed Ishmael to the night outside. There were no stars shining and the snowflakes passed right through her as they fell from the sky.

She wasn’t happy to be dead, exactly. There was a sense of melancholy in knowing that she was leaving the bar behind and… dammit, she should have written a testament like Peter had done to ensure it would stay open. She was going to miss her little house and her bathtub and her books and oh, crap, she never did find out if Claire chose Jamie or Frank.

But all of those things just… didn’t seem to matter as much. They were out of her control.

She was finally going to learn what the about Heaven was all about. If she was allowed in there, that was.

“So, what now?” Meg asked the Reaper. “Is there a light I’m supposed to see or…?”

“Well, I have to take you to have your soul weighed and… oh.” Ishmael blinked as he read the forms in his clipboard. “It says here that someone put in a special request to see you as soon as you died.”

“Who?”

Ishmael pointed ahead.

Standing between the ambulance and the police car, with his hands inside his trench coat pockets, looking brighter than everything around him, was Castiel.

Meg stopped on her tracks. She didn’t have a stomach anymore, but if she had, it would’ve turned into a knot the second her eyes fell on him.

Castiel walked up to her, calmly, but there was… eagerness in his blue eyes. An urgency she never thought she’d get to see.

“You’re taking it from here?” Ishmael asked, completely oblivious to the hurricane of emotions that was gripping Meg.

“Yes. Thank you,” Castiel replied. His voice was gruff and calm, just as she remembered it.

“Good.” Ishmael checked the watch on his wrist and sighed. “Maybe I can finish early. I hate the Christmas shift.”

And with that, he disappeared.

Meg was vaguely aware that there were other people standing outside with them (the paramedics wheeling her body or Ruby’s outside, Sheriff Jefferson talking to Eileen, Nadia hiding her face inside Tyler’s shoulder), but she couldn’t be bothered to care for any of them. Castiel’s presence in front of her filled up the air, like it was the only thing that demanded every bit of her attention.

He smiled softly at her.

“Hello, Meg.”

Meg slapped him.

She didn’t even think about it and if she had stopped to do it, she would have fully expected her hand to go through him. Maybe he allowed her to slap him because he knew he deserved it, and dammit, she would’ve done it again if her fury hadn’t been tempered by the immediate guilt that followed her action.

But she was still angry enough to scream at him.

“Hello? Is that all you have to say for yourself? _Hello?!_ ”

“Meg…”

“No, you listen to me, you pathetic excuse of an angel! Thirteen years, Castiel! Thirteen years, I prayed to you, every single day!”

“I know.” Castiel looked down at his shoes. “I heard you.”

“I had to _die_ for you to come and see me?! After I begged you, after I…?”

Castiel did probably the only thing that would’ve shut her up. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in. In a second his lips were against her, and they felt just as warm, just as soft as they had been. Meg found herself clinging to his trench coat and, despite all the rage she was still holding, getting as close as she could, almost wishing she could melt against him.

When they broke apart, Castiel still held her close, sinking his nose on her hair as he spoke to her:

“I couldn’t intervene. You had to find your own way to redemption, for redemption’s sake. I had to stay away for you to have a chance to make it into Heaven. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“No.” Meg pushed him away. Was she crying? Could she cry? It felt like she was crying. “No, you idiot. I wanted _you_. I wanted to see you. I wanted to…”

She couldn’t keep speaking, so she just kissed him again. Castiel opened his mouth and practically lifted her off the ground this time.

It was nice between his arms. It was safe. It was a little like coming back to her small house, after a long cold night at the bar, after placing another friend in a pyre.

The day was over and she was home, there in her angel’s embrace. The one thing she had longed for what felt like an eternity.

“I’m here now,” he promised her, running his fingers through her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m not letting you go, ever again. I love you.”

Meg hid her face in his neck. She hated how easily she had forgiven him.

She didn’t know how long they stayed there, just holding on to each other as the snow piled under their feet. It felt like minutes had passed, but when she looked up, she noticed all the car and the ambulances were gone. The door to her bar was covered in yellow tape that indicated it was, once again, an active crime scene.

She thought about Leah, Gus, Thomas, Kyle. How this would remind them of the night Peter had died. All the other hunters that came and went. The kids that had been possessed.

Sam. Eileen. Dean.

“Will they be okay?”

“That’s not for you to worry about,” Castiel told her.

“Can you at least tell me if Eileen will make it home?”

“She will if she’s meant to. Jack… I mean, the new God, he has a hands-off approach to all of these things.”

“Just letting the universe run its course, huh?”

“Pretty much, yes.” Castiel finally let go of her, but still grabbed her hand tightly. “I’m sure he’ll give me some leeway, though.”

“What does that mean?”

They started walking. It was the same familiar street, with the motel across and the empty alleyways, but at the same time… it wasn’t. It was blurry, like it was fading away with every step they took getting away from it.

“It means that I don’t care. I’m taking you with me.”

“To… Heaven?”

“Yes. But we should try to go through the official channels first anyway.”

There was a door standing right in front of them. Meg barely had time to register the fact that made no sense before Castiel opened and confidently strode inside, still holding her hand tight.

A man with tanned skin and a grey and black beard sat behind a desk in an art deco office. His desk was overflowing with folders and there were even more filing cabinets lined up against the walls, with some of the drawers opened and filled to the brim. The man raised his eyes at them, looking eminently tired.

“You don’t get to just skip the queue because your son is the new ruler of everything, you know?”

“Good night, Anubis,” Castiel greeted him, not at all affected by the man’s clear irritation.

“I’m busy,” Anubis replied. “Lots of last-minute regrets from dying billionaires this time a year.”

“Most people get easily sorted out,” Castiel explained to Meg. “Anubis handles the more complex cases.”

“Oh,” Meg said. “So… do the billionaires get to go to Heaven if they repent in their deathbeds?”

“Of course not. They’re billionaires.” Anubis stamped a seal in one of the folders and put it to the side. “They’re rotten to the core.”

“Anubis, please. This shouldn’t take too long.”

“Shouldn’t take long?” Anubis repeated, with a scoff. “Do you know what she’s done? _Everything_ she’s done?”

“Yes.” Castiel’s grip tightened a little around her hand. “I am aware.”

Anubis glared at him.

“Why do you even bother to ask me? You’re taking her there anyway. Stop wasting my time.”

“We’re eternal beings, Anubis.”

“Point still stands!”

Castiel gave him a shrug.

“Some of my brothers and sisters are still stuck in their ways, despite all the… improvements Jack has implemented and despite him being generous enough to bring them out of the Empty. Meg has been through enough. I would prefer it if no one could contest her belonging in Heaven.”

Anubis sighed.

“You’re not just going to leave me alone, are you?”

Castiel held his gaze in silence.

“Fine!” Anubis groaned as he opened one of his drawers and extracted what looked like an enormous abacus. “Let’s just go through with it.”

For the first time since he had kissed her again, Castiel let go of her. Meg took a step towards the desk, but froze. The acceptance she had felt when the Reaper had taken her evaporated and suddenly, she was scared. She wanted to grab unto Castiel and tell him to just take her out of that office, that she didn’t want to know if she was worthy in Anubis’ or the universe’s or Jack’s or whoever’s eyes. All that really matter was that she was worthy to him.

And she knew he would do it. She knew he didn’t care. He never had, even when she was twisted, corrupted thing of evil and darkness.

She knew it now, that he had loved her all along and that was enough.

Was it?

“We don’t have all day,” Anubis insisted, even though they most definitely did.

Meg raised her hand slowly.

Yes, it was enough to know Castiel loved her, regarding where they stood with each other. But she wanted to know anyway, for herself. Because, had it been enough? Had she earned this?

The beads began moving rapidly, crashing against each other, sliding up and down so fast it was hard to even keep track of them. It went on for what felt like hours, until they all finally stood still. Anubis looked at them with his eyebrows slightly raised.

“Well, would you look at that.”

“What?” Meg asked, as Castiel approached the desk and looked over her shoulder. “What is it?”

A soft smile appeared in Castiel’s lips as Anubis settled the abacus down and made a gesture.

“Welcome to Heaven, Miss Masters.”

When the office door opened again, she couldn’t see the cold grey streets of Sandlow, Wyoming, but a vast, open field covered in green, with an infinite blue sky shining above it.

Castiel took a step towards it, but stopped when he realized Meg wasn’t following him. He turned towards her.

“Meg?”

Meg was speechless, staring at that beauty with a closed throat.

“Who would’ve thought?” she said, with something that was halfway between a chuckle and a sob. “There must be bell ringing somewhere for a demon getting in here. Do I get wings?”

“No,” Castiel said bluntly. Then, after a few seconds, his expression softened. “But I can take you flying if you want.”

Meg choked out a laughter.

“All of these years,” she said, shaking her head as she approached him. “And you still never saw the damn movie.”

Castiel placed an arm around her waist and pulled her close.

“Well, we can watch it together if you want.”

Meg stood on the tip of her toes to give him a soft kiss.

“Yeah,” she said, as they stepped into Heaven. “I think that would be nice, Clarence.”


End file.
